Tuesday’s Republican debate contained several examples of creative foreign policy budget solutions. Michele Bachmann suggested, to much applause, that Iraq should “reimburse” the U.S. for “what we have done to liberate” them. But former Massachusetts governor stepped forward with a new proposal to have China take over the U.S.’s humanitarian aid responsibilities around the world. He said:

Part of [the foreign aid budget] is humanitarian aid around the world. I happen to think it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to borrow money from the Chinese to go give to another country for humanitarian aid. We ought to get the Chinese to take care of the people that are taking that borrowed money today.

Watch it:

What Mitt Romney doesn’t mention is that China already has an active foreign aid policy in Africa. And the aid rarely comes with onerous conditions like anti-corruption measures, government and economic reforms and accountability for how the money is spent. A Council on Foreign Relations report on Chinese efforts to secure access to African oil, says:

International observers say the way China does business—particularly its willingness to pay bribes, as documented by Transparency International, and attach no conditions to aid money—undermines local efforts to increase good governance and international efforts at macroeconomic reform by institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

While western economic aid is frequently criticized for requiring recipients to undergo at times disastrous economic reforms, the Chinese model is aimed toward securing access to natural resources with few strings attached to aid dollars.

A recent Chinese government report on foreign aid in Africa suggests that its aid “falls into the category of south-south cooperation and is mutual help between developing countries,” but critics charge that Chinese aid in Africa has frequently been used to strengthen authoritarian governments and feeds corruption.

After the U.S. abandoned Zaire strongman Mobutu Sese Seko, China stepped in, sending an estimated 1,000 Chinese technicians to work on agriculture and forestry projects in the early 1990s.

And earlier this year, China’s foreign minister pushed for the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe, provided an additional $7.5 million in aid to Robert Mugabe’s government and signed a new bilateral agreement between the two countries.

While Mitt Romney seems to think that encouraging China to take over the U.S.’s humanitarian assistance responsibilities is an easy and cost-free method of cutting the federal budget, he should take a closer look at how U.S. foreign policy interests in Africa might be effected by increasing the influence of Chinese foreign aid.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — a right-wing “pro-Israel” pressure group — attempted to paint the Occupy Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic. But while plenty of evidence runs counter to the ECI’s far-reaching assertions that politicians are “turning a blind eye to anti-semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” the ECI is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance.

ECI board member Rachel Abrams — wife of George W. Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams — litters her blog, “Bad Rachel,” with homophobic, anti-Palestinian, innuendo-filled screeds about political opponents.

Last year, she focused on Christopher Hitchens’ bisexuality in a post titled “Giving Homosexuality a Bad name.” She wrote:

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford.

And following the death of Sen. “Teddy” Kennedy (D-MA), she offered the following innuendo-filled limerick:

An amorous sot name of Teddy
Lost control when things got a bit heady.
He went over the side,
Left his ride in the tide,
And his squeeze giving head to an eddy.

But Abrams saves her harshest, most dehumanizing, words for Palestinians. Abrams writes that after Israel finishes celebrating the release of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, they should:

…round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.

Abrams’ violent fantasies are protected under the first amendment, but the organization’s leadership might want to look in the mirror before smearing the Occupy Wall Street protests as intolerant. (HT: Media Matters)

Our guest blogger, Lauren Jenkins, works on post-conflict peacebuilding issues at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center and writes about national security at her blog, International Development Without Pity.

On Friday, President Obama announced that approximately 100 U.S. troops would travel to Central Africa and begin assisting regional militaries pursuing the apprehension of Joseph Kony and other senior leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Defending his decision in an interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, Obama spared no adjective in describing the atrocities committed by the LRA:

“But those who are familiar with the Lord’s Resistance Army and their leader, Mr. Kony, know that these are some of the most vicious killers, they terrorize villages, they take children into custody and turn them into child soldiers, they engage in rape and slaughter in villages they go through. They have been a scourge on Uganda and that entire region, Eastern Africa.”

Words barely capture the horrors the LRA has visited upon the people of northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. Over the years, thousands of children have been abducted in LRA raids, indoctrinated, and exploited, some militarily, some sexually. Human Rights Watch reported in August 2010 that “many children as young as 10 or 11, abducted in Congo, CAR, and Southern Sudan in 2008 and 2009, are now armed with guns and participate in LRA attacks.”

It’s thus no surprise there has been bipartisan support for a more robust U.S. response to the LRA and its atrocities. In May 2010, Congress unanimously passed the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009. That bill laid the foundations for President Obama’s recent decision to send U.S. troops to reinforce the efforts of the Ugandan, Congolese, and South Sudanese armies, to finally put an end to the LRA and its use of child soldiers.

However, only a few weeks ago Obama issued a series of waivers that will allow the U.S. to continue providing funding and assistance to countries whose militaries recruit, conscript and use child soldiers. Under U.S. law, military aid to Yemen, Chad, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo should have been suspended due to the child soldiers among their armies’ ranks. Perhaps conveniently, two of those militaries are ones the U.S. will be working with in central Africa.

Worse, this is the second year in a row the U.S. has waived penalties for countries arming and exploiting children as combatants. Last year, the administration granted the same waivers with the intent that continued U.S. assistance and engagement would lead to a reduction in the use of child soldiers among the four militaries. It did not. Yet the same tactic is once again being used to circumvent the law.

President Obama was forceful in his reasoning for potentially putting U.S. troops in harm’s way to end the LRA’s reign of terror, highlighting its abominable use of child soldiers. But elsewhere, the exploitation of child soldiers’ goes unchecked. It won’t take 100 U.S. troops to end the practice in Yemen, Chad, the DRC, or South Sudan. It would simply take following the law and following the President’s own convictions.

At last night’s GOP presidential debate, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said Iraq and Libya should repay the U.S. for its war efforts in those two countries. When asked by CNN’s debate moderator Anderson Cooper whether she would cut aid to Israel, Bachmann responded that she would not. Then she went on to suggest that there were other ways the U.S. could spend less money on foreign affairs: by getting countries where the U.S. goes to war to repay the U.S. for its war expenditures. To raucous applause, Bachmann said:

Cutting back on foreign aid is one thing. Being reimbursed by nations that we have liberated is another. We should look to Iraq and Libya to reimburse us for part of what we have done to liberate these nations.

Watch the video:

There have been more than 100,000 documented civilian deaths in the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which, after a botched occupation, embroiled the country in a bloody sectarian civil war.

The idea of getting compensation from Iraq for the U.S. war effort there has been raised before by right-wing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who said Iraq should repay “some of the mega-dollars that we have spent here in the last eight years.” Rohrabacher went on to say: “There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that the people who have benefited from our benevolence should consider repaying us for what we have given them.”

At the time, ThinkProgress’s Scott Keyes asked Bachmann’s now-fellow candidate former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) what he thought about the idea. “I think that would send every possible wrong signal that America went to war for oil and we didn’t go to war for oil,” Santorum told Keyes (though he was mum on the subject last night).

The case of Libya is, of course, slightly different. The war there has only lasted some eight months, thus far, and is slowly winding down. In Libya, the opposition national council made an ask for international help, whereas in Iraq the George W. Bush administration simply banded together with exiled Iraqis who were sympathetic and could deliver splashy albeit faulty intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs.

Bachmann’s thoughts on Libya are not entirely dissimilar from a bill that made it out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this fall, but never came to a full vote before the whole body. That bill, a non-binding “sense of the Senate” resolution, said: “[F]unds of the Qaddafi regime that have been frozen by the United States should be used to reimburse the United States, as a NATO member, for expenses incurred in connection with” U.S. participation in the Libya war.