The 1.2 million was only up to 2007, which is why the later article quoted 2 million.
That’s just for AIDS. There’s also the President’s Malaria Initiative, created by Bush in 2005. It has distributed millions of mosquito nets, carried out indoor spraying activities that have protected 24 million people, distributed millions of doses of anti-malarial medications. As a result, childhood mortality in these countries has plummeted. and malaria cases have been cut in half.
For example, in Zambia in 2006, over 20% of children under the age of five had contracted Malaria. By 2008, that number had dropped to just over 10%. The mortality rate in Rwanda for children under 5 dropped from 150 per 1,000 in 2005 to about 100 per 1,000. About 3 million children are born in Rwanda every year. Before Bush’s program, about 450,000 of them would die each year. By 2008. that number was down to about 300,000. That’s 150,000 children saved every year in just one country in Africa.
The Bush Administration also did good work in Darfur and other conflict-torn regions.
If your question was whether this was more than other Presidents had done - it was. Bush quadrupled foreign aid to Africa during his two terms, and doubled foreign aid overall.
I know your hatred of all things Bush has blinded you, but you should wake up about what he’s done in Africa. He’s loved over there (approval ratings around 80%), and for good reason.
I’ll leave you with the words of noted right-wing reactionary Bob Geldof:
Thanks Sam, but none of that qualifies as a cite for “George Bush’s foreign policy on balance saved more lives than any president’s policies have in decades”, which is what BG was asking for.
Hell, by your logic, we could equally well argue that Reagan’s foreign policy on balance saved the most lives of any president in history because he didn’t nuke the USSR.
Trying to claim that the lives lost as the result of a particular misguided policy somehow don’t “count” because a larger number of lives were preserved as a consequence of a different policy is a head-up-ass argument.
Oh, come on. This isn’t a hypothetical like “Reagan saved millions because he didn’t start WWIII”. These are programs that came straight out of the White House. He didn’t just sign some bill Congress pushed on him - he created them, fought to get the funding, and implemented them. There’s a reason it’s called the “President’s Malaria Initiative.” PEPFAR was announced in a State of the Union speech in 2003, and was driven by the White House.
Not only that, but the actual results of these programs are easily quantified. I posted links to the numbers. There is no question that Bush is directly responsible for saving millions of people.
So who else qualifies? Clinton? Maybe you can highlight some specific initiatives that Clinton undertook that had the same kind of results? Maybe George Bush I? Reagan? Carter? We’re already back ‘decades’ like I said, and I don’t think any of them did as much as George W. Bush did in terms of taking direct initiative on an issue that saved so many people. But maybe I’m forgetting something.
What does that matter? Trying to handwave away the loss of lives due to bad decisions by pointing to the saving of lives due to completely separate good decisions is still a head-up-ass argument, whether the good decisions were passive (like not starting WWIII) or active (like working for a malaria prevention program).
No one’s handwaving away the loss of lives. I’m saying that the overall judgment of a President has to include his good actions as well as his bad. And there is no question that Bush was a major force for good throughout the continent of Africa.
Well, that statement requires conveniently forgetting how his reinstatement (immediately upon taking office) of the Mexico City Policy or “global gag rule”, which cut off US funding to any family planning organization in third world countries that was involved in any way with abortion or abortion rights, hampered condom distribution and AIDS fighting efforts in Africa.
Bush’s Mexico City Policy was such a disaster for African anti-AIDS efforts that he ended up lifting the restriction specifically for PEPFAR. This initiative that you’re so adulatory about was largely an attempt to clean up a mess of his own making.
No, the question was about the numbers you cited. But you know that. As you know that there is no criticism from any significant number of people for his actions there, in fact it’s about the only thing listed when we’ve discussed “What did Bush do right?”. Also in fact, it’s the only thing you’ve got left you can point to as success after your eight years of blind loyalty to him.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_bushs_aids_program_is_failing_Africans Bush’s insistence that Aids aid be coupled with abstinence education and strong anti-abortion rules taint the good that actually was achieved. He did make it possible for some to get aids drugs and change it from a death sentence to a chronic one.
He had to push his religious values on people from another continent.
And the numbers I cited backed up what I said. As usual, you haven’t provided any information of your own to this debate. Can you point to any other program initiated by a president in the last two decades which has saved as many lives as Bush’s PEPFAR or PMI?
You do know that the tagline for PEPFAR’s prevention aspect was “Abstinence, faithfulness, and Condoms”? PEPFAR has distributed tens of millions of condoms throughout Africa. The complaint was that the relative percentage of funding was too heavily weighted towards abstinence and faithfulness, and not enough towards condom distribution. But even the percentage that went to condom distribution was more than any other president had provided for a similar purpose.
In fact, of the total PEPFAR funds, 55% goes to treatment of current victims of AIDS, providing drugs that have saved many lives. 15% is spent on palliative care. 10% is spent to help orphans. Of the 20% that goes to AIDS prevention and education, only 33% is directed to be used for abstinence education. And, countries can apply to have that requirement waived.
That means only 6.6% of PEPFAR funds are used for abstinence education. Given that Bush increased funding of aid to Africa by a factor of four, it seems somewhat nitpicky to whine and moan about the fact that 6.6% of it will be spent on abstinence education. But of course, abstinence education is a politically charged subject, so Bush’s opponents seized on that aspect of PEPFAR and tried to smear the entire program with it.
The Bush administration’s total commitment to Africa exceeded 45 billion dollars. This is a huge sum of money. It’s far more than any other president ever did. The African people love the guy. “George Bush” is a common name for newborns in Africa. He has an 80% approval rating there, according to Pew. So it seems that they thought his program was very effective.
It’s enough work following behind you with a shovel, cleaning up after your own nonsense.
That from an ardent cheerleader of Bush’s Iraq war, an True Believer in Saddam’s WMD’s? An ardent cheerleader of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peopleThat?
Provide your standards for assessing “things that didn’t happen”, honestly, and we can get into such things.
Someone with your record really shouldn’t want to get into a discussion about respect for facts and acceptance of responsibility.
Condom usage made very little difference in the new infection rate of AIDs. After an initial decline (with decreases in casual sex and multiple partners and an increase in fidelity, and no change in condom usage), the new infection rate has since increased slightly, despite massive increases in condom usage. The rate of casual sex/multiple sex partners also increased during the same time period.
It’s pretty obvious, once you step back from an agenda, that condoms are really just a band aid. The reduce the risk, but they do nothing to solve the problem. If you are worried about people bleeding to death, having band-aids around is great, but you need to teach people to modify their behavior so that they aren’t getting cut all the time if you want to actually solve the problem.
How is defining the conditions of how we will help someone, ‘pushing’, one’s beliefs? If I don’t give a crack addict panhandler my change cuz i know he’s going to put it in his pipe, am I pushing my ‘beliefs’, on him? I’m sorry to say, but limiting aid based on a moral guideline isn’t pushing, as it’s a passive limiter. It doesn’t stop anyone else from providing aid through those means.
I mean after all, the only real way not to push beliefs on the Africans would be to do nothing whatsoever for them and simply let them die of AIDS.
All anti-AIDS initiatives should be coupled with abstinence education. The only way to CERTAINLY not get AIDS through sexual intercourse is to be abstinent. It’s important to teach that because it’s a basic fact. If this is left OUT of AIDS education, then you are doing the target market a disservice because you aren’t giving them the important facts about how AIDS is transmitted.
Except that I didn’t spout nonsense, everything I said was exactly correct, but that didn’t stop you from being a pissy little gadfly who had to dive-bomb the thread with your usual content-free attacks and snark. And when pushed to actually contribute something, you come up with a pathetic little justification like this and run away.
This is your modus operandi when it comes to political threads. I never see you doing any heavy lifting. I never see you post thoughtful, well-cited messages backing up your point of view. You just hover around looking for enemies to attack, which you do by simply attacking their character or making vague accusations you don’t have to defend, instead of by posting well-cited rebuttals that might actually contribute to the debate.
You’re a complete waste of bandwidth on this message board. Well, at least in Great Debates and here. Occasionally you have something useful to add when the discussion turns to engineering or aviation. That’s about it.
