Bob Barr

U.S. Can Rest Easy; Vanuatu Is Secure

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

April 19, 2006

OK, readers, put away your books, take out a pencil and paper and prepare to take a pop quiz.

True or false:

1. There is a real country named Vanuatu in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with no conceivable national security value to the United States.

2. Vanuatu has recently been given nearly 70 million of your tax dollars.

3. Vanuatu and six other small countries, including Cape Verde, have recently been awarded 1.2 billion of your tax dollars as part of a program dreamed up by President Bush to help the "fight against global terrorism."

4. Congress and the Bush administration are proposing to spend even more billions of taxpayer dollars on something called the "Millennium Challenge Account" program to reduce poverty and aid in the war against terrorism in small, largely unknown countries with no national security value to the United States.

5. The billions of dollars already spent, and proposed to be spent, on the Millennium Challenge Account program could be used to demonstrably help secure our border with Mexico by hiring thousands of Border Patrol agents.

6. The Bush administration and Congress continue to whine that they don't have enough money to hire a sufficient number of Border Patrol and immigration service agents to properly enforce our immigration laws.

If you answered "True" to each of the above six questions, give yourself a perfect score.

When you read about a program such as the "Millennium Challenge Account," launched by Bush in an apparent move to prove he has an even "kinder and gentler" side than his father, and especially when you read in the laughable description of the program that the president actually believes it will help in the global war on terrorism, you really have to wonder what these folks in the nation's capital are smoking. Rest assured, whatever it is, it will cost us — America's taxpayers — a lot of money. In fact, it already has.

The genesis of the MCA program is rooted in a 2002 speech by President Bush in Monterrey, Mexico, in which he called generally for a "new compact for global development." This should have been the end of the matter.

Like so many goofy ideas proposed by U.S. presidents while traveling to foreign lands and temporarily losing connection to the common-sense roots of the American electorate, the call for yet another foreign aid program should have been quickly forgotten once Bush returned stateside and could drink the tap water again. Unfortunately, folks in the bowels of the executive branch got a hold of the idea, thought it would make a nifty way to prove how nice a guy the president is, and actually cobbled together a program to spend taxpayer dollars in pursuit of this latest foreign aid will-o'-the-wisp.

The program they came up with, and for which Congress is actually appropriating money, is one of the most bizarre schemes this former member of Congress has seen (and he's seen many). It is actually codified in federal law as the "Millennium Challenge Act of 2003."

Development assistance would be provided through the Millennium Challenge accounts based on a review of needy countries from Afghanistan to Zambia. The review would be conducted by a stellar panel dubbed the "Millennium Challenge Corporation Board of Directors," based on an analysis of 16 "indicators" tending to establish a likelihood that the potential recipients are "ruling justly, encouraging economic freedom and investing in people."

Criteria to be considered include several about which questions could be raised even if the United States were being evaluated as a possible recipient: commitment to civil liberties, deficit spending and government effectiveness.

But, perhaps luckily, the MCC board does not have to rate the United States. Regardless, the board has plenty of leeway built into the operative statute, which essentially allows it to ignore the objective evidence for each of the 16 listed criteria, and instead substitute "other data" and "qualitative information" as it may find necessary.

Thus, after concluding this arduous project, our Millennium Challenge Corporation Board of Directors proudly announced in a news release last month that the tiny, but by definition vitally important, island nation of Vanuatu (which was last known to the U.S. military as the New Hebrides during World War II), had been selected to receive $66 million, or more than $300 for every man, woman and child in its population.

Thank goodness we have thereby wrested this potential terrorist training ground from the clutches of al-Qaida. And thank goodness we have an administration and a Congress that understand it is more important to fund economic development in Vanuatu than to help secure our own borders.

Mr. Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.