The Spectator this week contains a brilliant piece on the crisis in Somalia by our
Kenyan columnist Aidan Hartley. The Daily Telegraph today reports that voters are extremely sceptical about Cameron’s aid policy, wary of shovelling cash overseas when we’re hard-up at
home. Aidan’s piece proves the voters absolutely right (no surprise).
Not only would the cash be better spent in Britain, but according to Aidan, aid money in Somalia actually makes the situation there much, much worse. He says:
‘I am haunted by the people I have seen die in Somalia, and by news pictures of the latest famine, but aid agencies are presenting this crisis misleadingly — as if it were an act of God in the Old Testament. In early July charities were blaming it on the ‘worst drought in 60 years’. They are still calling it the ‘worst drought ever’ when in recent days torrential rains have flooded refugee camps in Mogadishu. The reality is that war caused this famine, not a drought, and the heart of it is in the battlefields of southern Somalia.‘
Aidan has reported on Somalia for twenty years, he really knows what he’s talking about.
Elsewhere, Christopher Caldwell has done our cover story on the sorry state of America. Where did it all go wrong? he asks. President’s Obama ugly compromise with the Republicans this week
over the debt crisis solves nothing: America is facing a moral crisis, not just an economic one. Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are incapable of seeing why they shouldn’t receive
$5 dollars in government services for every $3 they pay in taxes. It cannot carry on.
Also from America we have Andrew J. Bacevich debunking the cult of Petraeus, who has just become director of the CIA. The media may suck up to him, says Bacevich, but his actual achievements
are few and far between. The much-lauded ‘surge’ has not stopped the bloodshed in Iraq, and he has done little to solve the disastrous entanglement that is the West’s war in
Afghanistan. Why is he seen as America’s foreign policy saviour?
And if you fancy something lighter, Olivia Glazebrook has a wonderful, lyrical piece about being an Englishwoman in rural France. It’s just terrific. Please do read it.
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