Foreign Aid Program Needs Rethinking

The opinion-page article ``Dispelling a Few Myths About US Foreign Aid,'' Feb. 2, is timely and welcome. Regrettably, however, the author focuses on past successes, such as the Marshall Plan, without acknowledging the present-day shortcomings of our foreign-aid program.

Since the signing of the Camp David Accords, close to half of the United States foreign-aid dollars go to just two countries: Israel and Egypt. And Israel receives, on a per-capita basis, about 20 times as much aid as does its Arab neighbor. It is time to refocus our aid program toward humanitarian concerns of feeding the hungry and building the economies of poor nations, rather than arming the nations of the Middle East at taxpayer expense and declaring it ``foreign aid.'' It is about time to plug that sinkhole. Paul D. Noursi, Silver Spring, Md.

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