Arthur Silber dissents from Bush's African AIDS plan. He makes some cogent points about the Administration's priorities, but I wonder if he is really right about the reasons behind the proposal.

Perhaps my mind is a little too twisty and paranoid, but I don't think the AIDS proposal is really about humanitarianism (though that is a nice side-effect) or domestic politics (ditto). I actually think it ties into the War on Terror.

Africa's got to be a prime recruiting ground for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups; we've seen some of that already in Sudan and Kenya.

But if you literally depend upon aid from the United States for your day-to-day survival, are you going to support or oppose an anti-American movement like al Qaeda?

No, we probably aren't going to explicitly tie aid to anti-terrorist policies of host countries. But if aid is accompanied by American aid workers, we will surely refuse to send those workers to places we consider unsafe -- i.e., terrorist strongholds. This implicitly creates pressure on the host government to clean house. It may have a similar effect more conventional thugs like Mugabe.

UPDATE: This interpretation is backed up by this story (link courtesy of InstaPundit), which says that 90% of the aid will be administered by US agencies, not by international aid organizations. Such an arrangement would allow the US latitude to send aid where it will do the most good, geopolitically speaking. (It will also keep certain corrupt organizations [ahem] from embezzling or otherwise wasting the money.)