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06/22/2003 Archived Entry: "Are NGOs the next to go?"
Are NGOs the next to go?
According to Naomi Klein in Guardian, NGOs will either fall in line as an 'arm of the government,' or will be forcibly dried up and blown away.
As for influence, few peddle it quite like the AEI, whose looniest of ideas have a habit of becoming Bush administration policy. And no wonder. Richard Perle, member and former chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is an AEI fellow, along with Lynne Cheney, the wife of the vice-president, and the Bush administration is crowded with former AEI fellows. As President Bush said at an AEI dinner in February: "At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds." In other words, the AEI is more than a think-tank - it's Bush's outsourced brain. Taken together with Natsios's statements, this attack on the non-profit sector marks the emergence of a new Bush doctrine: NGOs should be nothing more than the charity wing of the mili tary, silently mopping up after wars and famines. Their job is not to ask how these tragedies could have been averted, or to advocate solutions. And it is certainly not to join anti-war and globalisation movements pushing for real political change.
The control freaks in the White House have really outdone themselves this time. First they tried to silence governments critical of their foreign policies by buying them off with aid packages and trade deals. (Last month US trade representative Robert Zoellick said that the US would only enter into new trade agreements with countries that offered "cooperation or better on foreign policy and security issues".)
Next they made sure the press didn't ask hard question during the war by trading journalistic access for editorial control. Now they are attempting to turn relief workers in Iraq and Afghanistan into publicists for Bush's Brand US. The US government is usually described as "unilateralist", but I don't think that's quite accurate. The Bush administration may be willing to go it alone, but what it really wants is legions of self-censoring followers, from foreign governments to national journalists and international NGOs.
