placed on us by law, appear to be two-faced on these things," Bush told Diggs.
Some weeks later, Bush gave a lecture to students at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he
announced that the US was now using the provisions of the Byrd amendment actually to purchase
Rhodesian chrome, and conceded that this was indeed a violation of the UN economic sanctions.
Noting that the policy was causing the Nixon regime "considerable embarrassment," Bush
nevertheless defended the chrome purchases, saying that the US was acting "not in support ofcolonialism or totalitarianism but it seemed the realistic solution," more desirable than paying (^)
"twice the price" for Russian chrome. Bush lamely pointed out that many other countries were
violating the sanctions covertly, whereas the US was doing so overtly, which he suggested was less
reprehensible. [fn 29]
On the problems of Africa in general, Bush, ever true to Malthusian form, stressed above all the
overpopulation of the continent. As he told the Congressmen: "Population was one of the things I
worked on when I was in the Congress with many people here in this room. It is something that the
UN should do. It is something where we are better served to use a multilateral channel, but it has
got to be done efficiently and effectively. There has to be some delivery systems. It should not bestudied to death if the American people are going to see that we are better off to use a multilateral (^)
channel and I am convinced we are. We don't want to be imposing American standards of rate of
growth on some country, but we are saying that if an international community decides it is worth
while to have these programs and education, we want to strongly support it." [fn 30]
On individual African countries, Bush asked the Congressmen to increase US aid to Chad, making
it obliquely clear that his interest in Chad came from the country's "fierce independence" in a
"pressure area vis-a-vis the north," meaning Qaddafi's Libya. Bush discussed the Middle East crisis
at length with Nimeiri of the Sudan, with whom the US had no diplomatic relations. Bush thought
that Nimieri was interested in restoring and improving relations with the US. These exchanges arehistorically ironic in the light of Bush's later role in the coup that overthrew Nimieri in the mid-
1980's. By contrast, Bush said that Somalia, where the US had recently cut off aid, had shown no
interest in improving ties with the US. In Botswana, Bush says he was impressed by the ministers
he met. In Zambia, the big emphasis was on the problems of the front-line states. In all of the
African capitals on his itinerary, Bush was struck by the intensity of the committment ofgovernments to progress and to sovereignty: "...in whatever part of Africa and however diverse (^)
Africa is, there was always a large amount of time devoted to development, economics, and, again,
independence, nationhood, this kind of thing." It was clear that Bush would never have much
sympathy for the "nationhood thing." But he was aware that Africa had 42 votes out of 132 UN
member states in the General Assembly.
Two aspects of Bush's testimony on his African trip throw light on the permanent axioms of his
thinking process. In one such revealing incident, Bush describes his "not hostile" but "very frank"
dialogue with "a bunch of the intellectuals in Nigeria." Bush told the Congressmen that these
intellectuals "were inclined to equate our queat all, and they would state, 'Look, your own Revolution was a nonpeaceful change.'" This exchangest for peaceful change with the status quo, no change (^)
became a way for Bush to state that the principles of natural law in the struggle against colonialism
which were expressed in the American Revolution had now been superceded by the supernational
principle of the United Nations as a world government which must validate all political change.
Here is the way Bush expressed this idea: "And my answer to that was, one, we mean both peacefuland change, and two, the United Nations Charter was not in existence at the time of the US
Revolution. We are not going to give up on the United Nations, which commits itself to peaceful
change." [fn 31]
The second revealing exchange involved Bush's relation to the policies that he was carrying out.