Bush Must End His Unilaterist AIDS policy

To the editors:

In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, President Bush called for $15 billion to fund his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Real World, “Bush Delivers State of the Union Address,” Jan. 29). This five-year plan will seek to work with both private and public organizations in Africa and the Caribbean to educate, prevent and treat the AIDS virus. I applaud the president for this strong commitment to fighting AIDS overseas.

I question, however, his choice to act alone when a cooperative alternative exists. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, endorsed by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and popularly publicized by the partnership of former Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs and U2’s lead singer Bono, already has a framework for a similar initiative. This organization has the support and funding of 36 different nations. The United States was called upon to contribute $2.5 billion to the Fund, but to date has only pledged $500 million. Bush even opposed a bipartisan Senate bill in June that would have committed an additional $700 million. So why the sudden generosity?

The fact is that this latest initiative only continues Bush’s trend of acting unilaterally to solve a problem faced by the entire international community. Rather than donate $2.5 billion to an international effort to combat AIDS worldwide, Bush now commits the country to $3 billion per year to attack AIDS in a single continent. The infrastructure already exists to fund AIDS alleviation across the globe, but Bush will waste resources creating a separate establishment in order to have complete control over where the money goes.

Does Bush’s plan make sense? Of course not. Bush will abandon cooperation with the international community once again, but will still come out looking like a hero to his country.

Heather M. Langdon ’03

Jan. 29, 2003