Foreign aid
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Foreign aid is one of the few subjects on which John Kiriakou describes himself as an outlier rather than a dissenter with allies. "I'm a huge promoter of foreign aid. I'm part of a very minuscule minority in the United States on foreign aid, but I think that we should increase our foreign aid budget by a hundredfold and implement these programs."

The argument

His case is arithmetic rather than humanitarian, though he makes the humanitarian one first. Development should be done "because number one, it's the right thing to do", and, second, because "if these countries are able to develop their economies, they're not going to be sending refugees to the United States. They're not going to be sending young men into terrorist training camps. They'll be able to take care of themselves."

The multiplier he claims is five to ten: "for every dollar we spend on foreign aid it's going to save us $5 or $10, because we won't have these refugee problems or resettlement issues or civil wars breaking out and attacks against the United States." He gives, as a same-day illustration, an attack in Syria that killed two American soldiers and a Syrian translator.

The recruitment evidence behind it is his own interviewing of captured al-Qaeda foot soldiers, whose reasons for going to Afghanistan were economic and marital rather than ideological.

Where the left and the right part company

Kiriakou identifies foreign aid as the exact point at which an otherwise real alliance breaks. On military intervention, "this is one of those rare areas where the progressive left and the MAGA right intersect, and they agree on this issue", a convergence he welcomes: "I think we should all be working together to stop American military interventions overseas."

"The two sides part company on the issue of foreign aid, and I think the MAGA is wrong on foreign aid."

The Trojan horse problem

Kiriakou accepts the objection that Western development money arrives with conditions attached, and calls it "totally true." His remedy is not to stop giving but to stop demanding: "one of the problems that we run into in places like that where economic development is concerned is that there always is a quid pro quo, and there shouldn't be."

Sana'a

His illustration comes from Yemen, a country he says he visited many times and found worse on each visit. On one trip, his second or third, he met the Italian defence attachés and the Dutch ambassador, both of them proud of something the European Union had just built: a water-treatment plant for Sana'a.

The promise attached to it was concrete. It would be the first time Yemenis could drink water straight from the tap, and it was expected to transform agriculture for the region.

What Kiriakou says undid it was not the engineering. "They would have been right had the US not gotten involved along with the Saudis to make sure that Ali Abdullah Saleh remained as the president", a man he describes as more dictator than elected leader, "all the while the country is falling apart around him." The south moved again toward separation, the Houthis emerged from obscurity, "and the whole place ended up going to hell."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- The al-Qaeda foot soldier
- Yemen
