Misplaced Priorities: A Focus on Guns

The AIDS epidemic, as former South African President Nelson Mandela said at the global AIDS conference last week, “is a tragedy of unprecedented proportions.” A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate now projects that one out of four people in southern Africa is likely to die of the disease and warns that unimaginable toll may be repeated, if not exceeded, in south Asia and Russia. Yet, the U.S. reaction to this pandemic makes one thing clear: We don’t do plagues; we do guns.

The AIDS pandemic will take more lives than the bubonic plague that depopulated 14th-century Europe. The U.S. Agency for International Development projects that 28 million children in sub-Saharan Africa alone will lose at least one parent from AIDS by 2010. According to the NIE, the result will be “demographic catastrophe,” with a huge, impoverished orphan generation growing up malnourished, marginalized, uneducated and vulnerable to exploitation. Of the 34 million people now infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, 30 million are extremely poor, living on less than $2 a day. They are simply written off. “They’re all dead already,” one U.S. official told the Washington Post. “They’re just still walking around.”

There is some hope. Unlike the bubonic plague, we know how to stem the spread of AIDS. In Uganda and Senegal, aggressive prevention campaigns waged by the governments dramatically slowed the spread of the disease, saving millions of lives. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS estimates it will take about $2 billion more a year to wage a prevention campaign in sub-Saharan Africa alone, of which only $300 million has been committed. To go from prevention to treating those with the disease would cost billions more, depending on the price of the expensive drugs in the “AIDS cocktails” that have been effective in the wealthier nations at extending life and the costs of effective delivery systems.

The Clinton administration was admittedly slow to react to this global crisis. A remarkably accurate 1991 CIA forecast of the catastrophe was ignored. Global AIDS budgets remained flat over the decade.

This year, however, the administration finally came alive. The United States sponsored a special session of the U.N. Security Council on the global AIDS crisis, with Vice President Al Gore calling for “putting the AIDS crisis at the top of the world’s security agenda.” President Bill Clinton formally designated the disease a threat to U.S. national security--one that could topple foreign governments, touch off ethnic wars and snuff out hope in impoverished Africa. This is the first time a disease has been named a national-security threat. As part of the new drive, the Clinton administration announced it would double its budget request to combat AIDS across the world--raising it to $244 million, a sum the House of Representatives voted to support.

In a $1.8-trillion budget, the administration proposed spending what one aide called a “rounding error for the county budgets of Fairfax and Montgomery County” on a plague worse than the Black Death. For comparison, $244 million amounts to about 5% of the $5 billion in pork that Republican Sen. John S. McCain of Arizona identified in last year’s defense budget, money legislators larded into the budget that the Pentagon didn’t even ask for. $244 million is one-tenth of 1%, one-one-thousandth, of the administration’s military-budget request this year. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates’ foundation offered the same amount in a single grant supporting a search for an AIDS vaccine.

Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright says the United States is the “indispensable nation. We see farther than others.” Perhaps, but we do so with blinders on. The United States, contrary to its image, is not isolationist. We spend a greater proportion of our gross national product on international activities than any other advanced industrial country. But we spend 95% of that on the military. Our development and humanitarian assistance spending is less than one-tenth of 1% of our GDP, the lowest percentage in 40 years. In per-capita terms, we contribute less development assistance than any other industrial nation except Portugal.

This helps explain the belated and meager response to the global pandemic of AIDS. U.S. global budgets, attention, organization and thinking are dominated by military threats and capacities.

Consider the contrast. Congress just passed its annual “emergency supplemental” funding for this year. It included more than $2 billion to support U.S. military operations in Kosovo: almost 10 times as much for troops to keep order in tiny Kosovo than the entire budget for AIDS worldwide, a disease that threatens to destabilize dozens of countries. This isn’t due solely to our European sympathies. We spent about as much supporting the troops in the ill-fated Somalia peacekeeping operation. Race may be a factor in our ability to ignore the crisis in Africa. But our stilted global priorities count far more.

Ironically, the Clinton administration, the GOP Congress, Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush all agree that America spends too little on its military. They agree we should increase military spending (slated for more than $300 billion next year, 95% of its Cold War average) and cut domestic spending and nonmilitary international programs over the next five years. The global AIDS budget will have to compete for a share of a declining foreign-aid budget.

There is no external justification for these priorities. The AIDS pandemic is an immediate and growing global threat, already slashing life expectancy in sub-Saharan countries by 15 years or more. It is a catastrophe with no historical parallel. Militarily, on the other hand, the United States has no rival. Even the so-called rogue states--Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Cuba--have been demoted to “nations of concern.” They spend, collectively, less than $15 billion on their militaries, and only Cuba has a weapon that can reach these shores. The U.S. will spend more on developing and buying new weapons than any other country spends on its entire military.

We are a rich nation. We can afford a bloated military. But it comes at a price. Usually, the argument is made in terms of domestic needs: We have smart weapons while schools are literally falling apart.

But the real trade-off is on international affairs. Each year, U.S. military forces train, police, exercise or fight in more than 100 nations across the world. When an Iraqi division heads south in the desert, it is tracked instantly and can trigger an immediate deployment of air, sea and ground forces. But the spread of AIDS can threaten the lives of one in four people in sub-Saharan Africa, destabilize governments, set off a regional depression and still have trouble gaining attention, much less any serious commitment, from U.S. policymakers.

The administration is not solely at fault. It faces a Republican Congress that routinely assails foreign assistance. When Clinton declared AIDS a security threat, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) dismissed it as a gesture for “special interests,” meaning, presumably, African American voters. Our allies have also been slow to react to the AIDS crisis, waiting for Washington to take the lead.

The U.S. military is so powerful that we now wage wars without taking casualties. Our economy is so strong that we look on Russia’s misery or Africa’s horror at a far remove. The challenge of meeting the global AIDS crisis is forbidding. So perhaps it should not surprise us that U.S. response to this human disaster is slow and halting. Yet, one thing is certain: If there were a way to strafe or bomb AIDS, we’d be there. But we don’t do plagues.