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Let's just say that, in America, whoever the president may be, war is a given. Only the other week, the media was filled with shocked tales of how the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine was allowed to join a secret, encrypted Trump administration group chat to discuss the latest American war -- the one against the Houthis in Yemen. And yet strangely enough, amid all the shock, shock, shock of that super-secret meeting having let the wrong person in, it was the rare story that focused on what the meeting was actually about, or on the fact that Donald Trump, like every president before him going back at least to George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has launched or continued some kind of war (or wars) on this planet (almost invariably with disastrous results). Yes, why focus on the bombing of Yemen (Yemen!) when the real issue is messing with governmental secrecy or, as Trump's crowds used to chant about his first presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton, for using a private email server for secret work while secretary of state, "Lock her up!"
And yet the horror is that so many people, Americans and otherwise, have been swept up in such wars, including Christine Sheckler whom TomDispatch regular Arnold Isaacs focuses on today, as he considers the way the Trump administration has all but shut down the one part of the U.S. government abroad, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, that hasn't been focused on making war but on making so many people on the planet feel better (something neither Donald Trump, nor Elon Musk faintly desire). Yes, of course, who cares about global health? Who cares that, without USAID, Haiti, Kenya, Lesotho, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, and Ukraine could all run out of their HIV/AIDS treatments in the coming months with dire consequences; or that, in the Congo, tens of thousands of malnourished children will stop being treated; or that, in Senegal, the biggest program to deal with malaria has already been closed down, while in Bangladesh "upwards of 600,000 women and children will lose access to critical maternal health care, protection from violence, reproductive health services, and other lifesaving care"; or that nearly $60 billion will no longer be used to actually help people globally?
And so it goes in the second age of Donald Trump. Let Isaacs take you into the very world that Trump and Musk are shutting down in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. Tom
Elon Musk, Meet Christine Sheckler
Maybe She Could Educate the Guy with the Chainsaw -- Or Maybe Not
What put the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with an annual budget hovering at just about 1% of federal spending, at the top of Elon Musk's budget-cutting target list? Was it just a political calculation that foreign aid is a safe target because it's unpopular with so many Americans and cutting those funds will only hurt foreigners, not U.S. voters? Or was Musk motivated by some other grudge we haven't even heard about?
A related question: Why is his invective about that particular agency -- "a criminal organization," "a viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America," and similar blasts -- so much more inflammatory in tone and content than his statements about other government programs?
As reported by various news organizations, one of Musk's principal influencers on this issue appears to have been a man named Mike Benz, who served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and briefly in the State Department during President Trump's first term. Benz has spent the last few years promoting implausible conspiracy theories about USAID -- that it played a key role in paying for the 2019 attempt to impeach Trump, that it financed the creation of the Covid virus in a Chinese laboratory, that it funds "all the terrorist groups in Pakistan [and] terrorist groups in the Sahel in Africa," and numerous other wildly exaggerated or completely unfounded charges. Benz seems to have been the source of a number of Musk's specific allegations, most of them unsupported by any evidence, about corrupt or unjustified foreign aid projects.
This record leads to another question: What does Elon Musk really know about U.S. foreign aid, the agency staff that delivers it, or the people who receive it? Besides listening to Mike Benz's falsehoods, has he made any effort to do his own investigation? Has he ever personally seen a recipient of U.S. foreign aid, or someone whose job is to deliver it? Has he ever come face to face with a West African who depends on USAID for lifesaving medicine against deadly tropical disease, or a family driven from their home by war in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Ukraine, or one of the hundreds of thousands of hungry children in Haiti who face starvation without USAID food assistance? Has he ever spoken directly with anyone who could tell him first-hand about the work USAID staffers do, the people they help, or the hardships and dangers they often face on the job?
Someone like Christine Sheckler perhaps?
A Life Helping Others
Christine Sheckler, now retired, spent 27 years working for USAID, including two years in wartime Iraq. Other postings included tours in Sierra Leone, then recovering from a decade of civil war that had left 50,000 people dead and driven more than two million from their homes, as well as in several former Soviet republics, Pakistan, and other countries. In the real world, it's an all-but-sure bet that she will never have a conversation with Elon Musk, but I've wondered what such a conversation might have been like, and whether Musk might have modified his views in any way after listening to her -- say, as a start, about her experiences in Iraq.
Sheckler served in Iraq from 2008 to 2010, the years when Musk was putting his first Teslas on the road and (one can guess) paying little attention, or possibly none at all, to America's already disastrous war in Iraq, Americans serving there, or the war's impact on Iraqi civilians. She did not spend those years in the Green Zone, the well-protected seven-square-mile enclave in Baghdad where the American embassy and buildings housing the Iraqi government stood behind concrete and barbed-wire barriers and checkpoints manned by U.S. and other allied troops who controlled all traffic into or out of the area. Sheckler was based in the much more dangerous Red Zone, in the district of Abu Ghraib, a prominent staging area for insurgent attacks (and the site of the notorious prison of the same name where American troops brutalized Iraqi inmates).
"It was hard," Sheckler says, recalling her time there. "Every minute was dangerous." In the course of her work, focused on helping farmers, small-business owners, and local governments, she regularly traveled to less secure areas of the region, often meeting with local sheikhs. In those meetings, she took off her helmet and other protective gear, a "calculated risk," to avoid sending a message that she didn't trust the Iraqis she was dealing with.
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