David Harsanyi Recommend this article  So trust me when I tell
you that after nearly a day of intermittent research on the
Internet, I came across only a single criterion that foreign
nations must meet to receive aid from the United States: They
just have to ask. They don't even have to ask nicely.  Actually,
we began bribing the Egyptian dictatorship -- which is
pronounced "presidency" in Arabic -- with approximately $2
billion yearly beginning in the late '70s. The funding has
helped Egyptians break the habit of launching wars they couldn't
win and saved the Israeli army the hassle of sending tanks to
exurbs of Cairo every few years.  What the dollars did not seem
to do is help foster any more liberalism; the money did not
dissuade the Egyptian state-run media from fomenting anti-
Western conspiracies and hatred, nor did it quell radicalism,
and most consequentially, it did not stem the growing poverty in
the nation.  Most of our funding is apparently being used to
maintain an impressive modern military forc