Oh! What to do?

I have long been skeptical of the notion that the US should give financial gifts to other countries (ie. Foreign AID). It seems to me to be an unwarranted intrusion into another country's internal political dynamics. It tends to prop up up dictators, basically (all in the name of 'keeping the peace').

Now we get word that Humanitarian AID is having disastrous unintended consequences for the recipient countries. Case in point, Ethiopia. Remember "We Are The World" back in the mid-1980's? The song-spinners asked us to give money to help the poor and starving in Ethiopia. While we saw that people were indeed starving, we didn't see that there was a war going on - and that the AID prolonged the war and ultimately brought a repressive dictator to power. This dictator is still in power and he is still repressing his own people.

The starving children of Ethiopia were not the victims of drought, as most people believed at the time. They were the victims of politics. The government of the time was using famine as an instrument of war, and the rebels were more interested in defeating the government than in feeding famine victims. As William Easterly, a leading aid skeptic, puts it, “It’s not the rains, it’s the rulers.” Political famines attract the food aid industry, with the consequence that governments or rebel groups are able to feed their own armies and divert resources to buy more weapons. Humanitarian aid in conflict zones is always problematic. It helps the bad guys as well as the innocent.

I guess, in a way, I feel duped. In another way, I feel like people exploited my intentions and sympathies for their own gain. And in another way, it's just sad that evil people make it difficult to help others. Oh! What would Jesus do?