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发帖数: 824 | 1 Which United States president will go down in history as the greatest
umanitarian to have served in the office? The Republican Herbert oover is
often known as the "Great Humanitatarian" for his work administering famine
relief in post-World War I Europe (and Bolshevik Russia) in the 1920s -- but
he did all that before he actually became president.
Others might make the case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat who
succeeded Hoover in the White House, whose New Deal initiatives relieved
poverty and sickness on a grand scale within the United States.
But I'd suggest that there's one president whose contribution dwarfs all the
others. Unlike Hoover, he launched his program while he was in office, and
unlike FDR, he received virtually no votes in return, since most of the
people who have benefited aren't U.S. citizens. In fact, there are very few
Americans around who even associate him with his achievement. Who's this
great humanitarian? The name might surprise you: it's George W. Bush.
I should say, right up front, that I do not belong to the former president's
political camp. I strongly disapproved of many of his policies. At the same
time, I think it's a tragedy that the foreign policy shortcomings of the
Bush administration have conspired to obscure his most positive legacy --
not least because it saved so many lives, but because there's so much that
Americans and the rest of the world can learn from it. Both his detractors
and supporters tend to view his time in office through the lens of the "war
on terror" and the policies that grew out of it. By contrast, only a few
Americans have ever heard of PEPFAR, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief, which President Bush announced in his State of the Union
address in 2003.
Fast forward a decade later, and in his own State of the Union address on
Tuesday night, President Barack Obama only briefly mentioned the goal of "
realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation" -- an allusion to the long
-term aim of PEPFAR. Yet President Obama's most recent budget proposals
actually propose to cut spending on the program. That's a pity. This might
have been a good moment to celebrate ten years of an unprecedented American
success in fighting one of the world's most pernicious and destructive
diseases.
In his 2003 speech, President Bush called upon Congress to sponsor an
ambitious program to supply antiretroviral drugs and other treatments to HIV
sufferers in Africa. Since then, the U.S. government has spent some $44
billion on the project (a figure that includes $7 billion contributed to the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a multilateral
organization). By way of comparison, America's most recent aircraft carrier
-- which will join the 10 we currently have in service -- is set to cost $26
.8 billion. One medical expert calls PEPFAR the "largest financial
commitment of any country to global health and to treatment of any specific
disease worldwide."
It's impossible to tell exactly how many lives the program has saved, though
Secretary of State John Kerry recently claimed that 5 million people are
alive today because of it. That's probably as good an estimate as any. |
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