Bob Geldof interviewed George Bush aboard Air Force One for a must-read piece in Time magazine. It should come as no surprise that it takes an individual outside of journalism and politics to cut through the fog of false perceptions about the president. Here’s Geldof on Bush’s “Africa story”:
It is some story. And I have always wondered why it was never told properly to the American people, who were paying for it. It was, for example, Bush who initiated the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with cross-party support led by Senators John Kerry and Bill Frist. In 2003, only 50,000 Africans were on HIV antiretroviral drugs — and they had to pay for their own medicine. Today, 1.3 million are receiving medicines free of charge. The U.S. also contributes one-third of the money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — which treats another 1.5 million. It contributes 50% of all food aid (though some critics find the mechanism of contribution controversial). On a seven-day trip through Africa, Bush announced a fantastic new $350 million fund for other neglected tropical diseases that can be easily eradicated; a program to distribute 5.2 million mosquito nets to Tanzanian kids; and contracts worth around $1.2 billion in Tanzania and Ghana from the Millennium Challenge Account, another initiative of the Bush Administration.
While expendable legislators in New Hampshire and elsewhere waste taxpayers’ money on proceedings to impeach George Bush, Geldof—a man who’s spent decades staring humanitarian crisis in the face—gets to the heart of the President’s sense of morality and responsibility in history:
Bush adds, “One thing I will say: Human suffering should preempt commercial interest.”
It’s a wonderful sentence, and it comes in the wake of a visit to Rwanda’s Genocide Memorial Center. The museum is built on the site of a still-being-filled open grave. There are 250,000 individuals in that hole, tumbled together in an undifferentiated tangle of humanity. The President and First Lady were visibly shocked by the museum. “Evil does exist,” Bush says in reaction to the 1994 massacres. “And in such a brutal form.” He is not speechifying; he is horror-struck by the reality of ethnic madness. “Babies had their skulls smashed,” he says, his mind violently regurgitating an image he has just witnessed. The sentence peters out, emptied of words to describe the ultimately incomprehensible.
Geldof goes too easy on China, and he’s disappointingly clichéd on Iraq. But even there, he evinces a natural respect for Bush that’s vanished from the sphere of public criticism. In all, it’s an indispensible character portrait of the president.
