The contemporary notion of official development assistance (ODA) was brought to life at the outset of the postwar period by Harry Truman, whose administration started a massive and unprecedented aid effort exercised on a global scale. It was subsequently institutionalized and coordinated within the OECD framework under the political leadership of the United States. While John F. Kennedy introduced the development decade in the 1960s, the domain of foreign aid was ideologically and financially driven by the U.S. In the following decades, although the domination eroded, the U.S. retained its leading position in the donor community. Nonetheless, the actual commitment to development and poverty eradication of the U.S. administration has been widely disputed. The U.S. ODA has been constantly criticized for being overly politicized, national-interest oriented and serving geopolitical and security goals rather than genuinely promoting development and welfare in the world's poorest regions. Political allies (i.e. Israel, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt) have always enjoyed a privileged status over politically irrelevant yet severely underfinanced states of Africa and Asia. The pursuit of geopolitical and security objectives became even more pronounced after 9/11 when a massive aid started being channeled to Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of the shift in foreign policy and the war on terror. Many practices employed by the U.S. (i.e. tied aid) are regarded as anachronistic in light of the current trends in development cooperation and the OECD recommendations.