For anyone who understands the basics of the policies of interests, any kind of political aid is always interpreted as matter of interest or to be used as a pressure method in the future, U.S. foreign assistance to Egypt is a great example for that, not only it makes Egypt more dependent on US-Arms systems which implies more surveillance (only God knows what backdoor might be in those) and need for US services (due to maintenance and training) which will be a great future investment for the US arms industry (one of the greatest ever), but it also can be used as an efficient pressure point especially on the so-called underdeveloped states, i.e. poor countries that probably need these aids the most, which are also the only states qualified for receiving them. In fact we have seen this already happening for Egypt more than once, most recent in 2022, US withheld $130 million of that military aid (Pamuk and Lewis, 2022).

Reading (Gordon, 2010), Joy Gordon tells about what Noam Chomsky described once as “pulverization” of 3rd world/undefendable countries that might step on the US toes:

Indeed the US could make whatever the change they wanted on Iran by running a coup d’etat, something that they have practiced very well for decades (see (Blum, 2003), a fantastic literature on the subject), but this would not achieve the pulverization of Iraq.

Gordon discusses the brutal methods that the US applied using sanctions to cause human humanitarian crisis in Iraq. The war casualties is known for most of you, the 500,000 “worth it” childern and death of millions, however, Gordon encourages to look upon the “invisible war” effect, for example it’s known that alliance targeted many schools, hospitals and other civilian targets (on which the international community would comment “nothing serious”, of course it’s impossible to get the US into an international court for a war crime, Nicaragua has done its best on that already) however the sanctions resulted in 30% of Iraq health institutions to be dysfunctional by 1998, 70% of the population suffered from anemia and other treatable diseases, the annual death toll of Iraq increased by hundreds of thousands due to sanctions on drugs imports and lack of electricity to operate medical equipment (Gordon, 2010).

However, something else got me very interested on Gordon’s book: the process of issuing the security council resolution 661, which was indeed a very critical decision for a country like Iraq that is known to import most of its needs (70% by that time).

There, the US used sanction and aids as tools to get that resolution passed, as Gordon states, all the developing countries that voted for the resolution got many privileges; Egypt, Turkey, China and Jordon got to take their stumbled loans from the World Bank, and aids were sent to other countries like Colombia, Ethiopia and Zaire. Of course alliances had more interested in Iraq itself.

Yemen was one of the countries that voted against that resolution. As I mentioned above, countries that voted for it got so many privileges, which tells us a little about “how much is a seat on the Security Council worth” (Kuziemko and Werker, 2006)? Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker from Harvard answer in their analysis I really encourage readers to have a look at that paper for further study, it’s available for open view on https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=22724 :

Here the reader can expect what happened to Yemen; “That will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast” a U.S. diplomat told the Yemeni ambassador before dropping Yemen’s aid, a very poor country suffering from unending wars, from $70 million to $0.

Sasha Alyson has a fantastic article (Alyson, 2021) investigating further more on UN-related actions, including U.N. membership and UNESCO.