I am surely getting that story wrong (and will get it right when I get through the fine recent biography of Stone by D.D. Guttenplan), but the spirit is right, and important. I'm put in mind of it by two stories from today's news. One is on US policy in Egypt, and the other is on Bill Clinton's - I mean, US - policy on Haiti.
The Egypt story appeared in Haaretz (which consented to show me the goods only after assaulting me with a pop-up ad inviting me to buy a vacation home in what appeared to be an extremely fancy building in Tel Aviv). In it we learn that the US is suspending talks with Egypt on its foreign aid package in the wake of the ongoing protests. Now this could be nothing, the sort of merely logistical complication one might expect when embassies across the region have to stop business as usual to reassess their security plans. Or it could be something, a shot across the bow from the US urging Egypt to get its house in order. We need inside baseball commentary from someone who knows the signs to tell, and I haven't had time yet to see what the insiders are saying.
More interesting (to me, anyway) than the manifest subject of this first story was what appeared in paragraph three:
After last week's incidents, the State Department ordered all U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to review their security postures. As a result, a number of missions decided to destroy classified material, a U.S. official said on Monday.
This surely requires inside baseball commentary too, and maybe I'm making something of nothing, but wikileaks springs to mind, and I wonder what valuable information will go up in smoke, or down the shredder, with that material, and if there is something in particular that all of these embassies are eager to keep from seeing daylight.
The second story is from USA Today, and announces the latest international do-good coup for Bill Clinton. He has apparently worked out a deal whereby Qatar will put $12M in 'a special fund' for Haiti's ongoing earthquake recovery. It doesn't take special insight to notice that the special fund is a detour around Haiti's government, as all the components of the fund indicated in the article go to third parties - NYU, Xavier University, Partners in Health (which at least gives us one responsible NGO in the bunch), and so on. Again, more interesting is what appears farther down, in the last paragraph.
Clinton, the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, also announced a new partnership with New York University's Stern School of Business and the Center for Investment Facilitation. The effort aims to make it easier to invest in Haiti through the creation of what Clinton called a "one-stop shop for potential investors."
I find myself pretty worried by the language about a 'one-stop shop' for investors. I get visions of the scramble for Africa, or of the US rewriting Haiti's constitution during our early twentieth century occupation of the country in order to remove bans on foreigners owning land (and to do much else, to be sure). And I know the idea is to leverage investment as a resource for development. But this sort of thing can't be investment all the way down - the people still in need of permanent housing some two years after the quake don't need investment. They need housing. And they don't have housing because of the policy priorities that govern our 'aid': keeping the Haitian state prostrate, so that the island's resources - its labor and its still underexploited raw materials - remain easy for investors to access; and prioritizing only those ventures that benefit outside actors, from NGOs and universities to Clinton's curious investors.
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