( Tomdispatch.com ) – 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.
On two occasions, her work put her in immediate danger. The first was at a small building in downtown Baghdad where Sheckler had attended a meeting of the Baghdad local city council. She had just left in an armored vehicle (the type commonly called an MRAP, for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected), heading for the nearby U.S. embassy, and had ridden only a few blocks when the driver was ordered to turn around because the city council had just been attacked. After parking a block away, in case of another attack, Sheckler and several other passengers walked the rest of the way back to the council building, where a suicide bomber driving a vehicle loaded with explosives had been stopped by a barricade in front of the building and had then smashed into a parked MRAP outside the wall, setting off his blast. The bomber was killed, along with the driver and a passenger in a taxi following his vehicle, but although the explosion shattered parts of the roof of the council building and blew out all its windows, showering the people inside with broken glass, “by some miracle,” as Sheckler put it, there were no other casualties.
Some months later, she was riding in a vehicle immediately behind the Humvee (a military truck) at the head of a convoy, when a small white car coming from the opposite direction rolled to a stop a short way ahead. From her car, just 20 feet behind the lead vehicle, she saw a man get out with a phone in his hand, which he then used to set off an EFP (an explosively formed penetrator, a projectile carrying a superheated copper warhead that can be launched from a distance and punch through most protective armor). The blast blew the Humvee into the air, sending it flying into a pasture on the far side of the road, wounding the three soldiers and a civilian riding in it. The most seriously wounded was the driver, who lost his right leg below the knee and suffered a shattered lower left leg and massive internal and external burns. Sheckler knew him and all her convoy soldiers, since the same unit escorted her every day on her travels around the district.
Via Tomdispatch.com )
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