Ramsey Clark admires Taylor personally and points out that he went to war against the repressive Doe regime, which had received close to half a billion dollars in aid and military assistance from the Reagan Administration.
The Bush Administration has publicly pledged the Siniora government a billion dollars in aid since last summer.
Half a billion dollars of aid pledged to end the Ebola outbreak in west Africa still hasn't been paid, according to the UN's response co-ordinator.
Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General, asked for a billion dollars in aid, but after a month barely a third of that money had arrived.
The international community pledged several billion dollars in aid to Haiti after a catastrophic earthquake struck the Caribbean nation in January 2010.
Even the seven and a half billion dollars in aid over five years that is awaiting approval by Congress falls far short of what Holbrooke once estimated as Pakistan's actual need: fifty billion dollars.
But to do this requires not just money – Haiti, he points out, is still languishing in poverty despite having received several billion dollars in aid since the earthquake that devastated the country in 2010.
Much of the frustration has arisen because many charities, from the Sept. 11 Fund to the city firefighter union's Widows' and Children's Fund, have yet to distribute a total of roughly a billion dollars in aid.
But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr. Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home.
So imagine having sat on your roof for four days waiting for rescue, and now being stuck in limbo with a ruined house and no forthcoming insurance payment or federal-housing assistance — and then hearing that the government refused roughly three quarters of a billion dollars in aid.
Another petition, organised by the American Centre for Law & Justice (ACLJ), obtained over 200,000 signatures and called for America's eight billion dollar yearly aid to Pakistan to stop whilst persecution of minorities is allowed in that country.
