Bush Does Better in Africa

Is George Bush the first president to give Africa the attention it deserves? Given Bush's poor standing among African-American voters, such a claim sounds strange. Nine out of ten African Americans voted for Bush's opponents in the last election -- and are likely to do the same in the next. But while Democrats are the party of African Americans, Bush is proving that the Republicans are the party of Africa.

Bush's interest in Africa, the poorest region of the world, is profoundly surprising -- and not the least to Africans who realize that America's war on terrorism has distracted attention and money from the region's pressing problems of civil war, HIV/AIDS and chronic under-development. Yet Bush's engagement in Africa may well overshadow in significance the other foreign activities of his presidency.

How is this possible? Won't Bush be best remembered for his pursuit of terrorists? He is, after all, the President who overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan. He invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein. He called for the spread of democracy in the Muslim world, giving tacit encouragement to dissenters in Egypt and Pakistan -- the most important American client-states, whose de facto military dictators are truly puppets of Washington.

Yet Bush's most publicized -- and dubious -- actions on the world stage may prove his most ephemeral. Afghanistan and Iraq may return to their historic arc no matter Bush's insistence that freedom is another name for the casual tyranny and relentless chaos of a failed state. Bush's promotion of what he calls "democracy" is likely to be a spectacular failure if only because the president is committed to defending those dictators that do his bidding or at least pretend to. And Bush's war on terror, if it continues to prove inconclusive, will be ultimately discarded, replaced by a more pliable concept such as "peaceful co-existence."

Bush's interest on Africa, by contrast, may contain the seeds of a significant legacy -- by virtue of his decision to give Africa the most sustained attention by any president since James Monroe nearly 200 years ago imagined re-colonizing parts of the "dark continent" with freed slaves.

In the 1800s, the U.S. generally ignored sub-Saharan Africa, merely observing Europe's dominance over the region. The U.S. played a small role even the de-colonization of Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the creation of dozens of independent black African nations helped fuel the civil rights movement.

During the Cold War -- the period of fierce rivalry with the Soviet Union, from the late 1940s until the end of the 1980s -- U.S. intervention in sub-Saharan Africa was destructive and largely concerned with limiting Soviet influence in the region. Americans respected and even pandered to Europe's need to continue its economic exploitation of Africa.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. lost all strategic interest in Africa. War raged throughout the sub-continent and the U.S. did nothing. Inaction proved most shameful in Rwanda, where some have argued that with a small show of soldiers on the ground in 1994, the U.S. could have prevented the massacre of hundreds of people. Less famously, the U.S. failure to intervene in Liberia led to the bloody collapse of this former colony of American slaves. To be sure, the U.S. sent troops to Somalia, but poor planning led to a humiliating scene of a dead American soldier dragged through the streets of a Somali city.

Neither the first President Bush nor President Bill Clinton ever found a reason to engage Africa that went beyond empty rhetoric. To be sure, Clinton visited Africa (the first president ever to do so) and remains popular with Africans. But Africa suffered on Clinton's watch, falling further behind the rest of the world in almost every measure of health, education and wealth.