Daily Archive

Why do we act surprised when areas of the world erupt into bloody vicious conflict.  We are shocked at the intensity and absolute disregard for human life.  Yet how do the ‘bad guys’ get access to all these calamitous weapons?  

We sell them.  We sell a whole bunch of weapons in nearly every corner of the world to pretty much anyone who has the cash.  That’s how.  This has been a feature, as Mr.Hartung states, of every presidency from Nixon on in.  It is the status-quo and has bi-partisan support, for decades.

Another prestigious brick in the monument attesting to the trivial worth of human life.  We in the civilized West speak of human rights while ensuring through our arms sales they they will never become universal rights.

Fuck.

If it makes you feel better, slap the ‘business is business’ rhetorical dodge all over this appalling fact.  This is what happens when we divorce the public from the political decision making process.  This is what happens when we lose the basic trait of empathy toward others.  The feelings are the same when someone on the other side of the globe loses a loved one.  Gunshot wounds maim people and cripple family units for life whether it is here in North America or in San Salvador, Syria, or Yemen.

Yet geography makes a (fateful) difference.  We disassociate from the losses people experience ‘over there’.  We remain ignorant of our contribution in the slaughter of innocent people across the globe.  It is a moral chasm that follows us. arms dealers to the world, ignorant or not, of to what we are really committed to as a nation.  The lofty rhetoric we hear on the news from the political class is divorced from the realpolitik in which we actually operate and base our foreign policy on.

My real fear is this – what if people are informed of the real nature of this aspect of the world, and their response is apathy.  I would not know what to do after that.

Anyways, my moralizing aside read the entire article at Tom’s Dispatch, but this is the part I was commenting on:

 

“Though Saudi Arabia may be the largest recipient of U.S. arms on the planet, it’s anything but Washington’s only customer. According to the Pentagon’s annual tally of major agreements under the Foreign Military Sales program, the most significant channel for U.S. arms exports, Washington entered into formal agreements to sell weaponry to 130 nations in 2016 (the most recent year for which full data is available). According to a recent report from the Cato Institute, between 2002 and 2016 the United States delivered weaponry to 167 countries — more than 85% of the nations on the planet. The Cato report also notes that, between 1981 and 2010, Washington supplied some form of weaponry to 59% of all nations engaged in high-level conflicts.

In short, Donald Trump has headed down a well-traveled arms superhighway. Every president since Richard Nixon has taken that same road and, in 2010, the Obama administration managed to rack up a record $102 billion in foreign arms offers. In a recent report I wrote for the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, I documented more than $82 billion in arms offers by the Trump administration in 2017 alone, which actually represented a slight increase from the $76 billion in offers made during President Obama’s final year. It was, however, far lower than that 2010 figure, $60 billion of which came from Saudi deals for F-15 combat aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, transport aircraft, and armored vehicles, as well as guns and ammunition.

There have nonetheless been some differences in the approaches of the two administrations in the area of human rights. Under pressure from human rights groups, the Obama administration did, in the end, suspend sales of aircraft to Bahrain and Nigeria, both of whose militaries were significant human rights violators, and also a $1 billion-plus deal for precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia. That Saudi suspension represented the first concrete action by the Obama administration to express displeasure with Riyadh’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. Conducted largely with U.S. and British supplied aircraft, bombs, and missiles, it has included strikesagainst hospitals, marketplaces, water treatment facilities, and even a funeral. In keeping with his focus on jobs to the exclusion of humanitarian concerns, Trump reversed all three of the Obama suspensions shortly after taking office.

Fueling Terrorism and Instability

In fact, selling weapons to dictatorships and repressive regimes often fuels instability, war, and terrorism, as the American war on terror has vividly demonstrated for the last nearly 17 years. U.S.-supplied arms also have a nasty habit of ending up in the hands of America’s adversaries. At the height of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, for instance, that country’s armed forces lost track of hundreds of thousands of rifles, many of which made their way into the hands of forces resisting the U.S. occupation.

In a similar fashion, when Islamic State militants swept into Iraq in 2014, the Iraqi security forces abandoned billions of dollars worth of American equipment, from small arms to military trucks and armored vehicles. ISIS promptly put them to use against U.S. advisers and the Iraqi security forces as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Taliban, too, has gotten its hands on substantial quantities of U.S. weaponry, either on the battlefield or by buying them at cut-rate, black market prices from corrupt members of the Afghan security forces.

In northern Syria, two U.S.-armed groups are now fighting each other. Turkish forces are facing off against Syrian Kurdish militias that have been among the most effective anti-ISIS fighters and there is even an ongoing risk that U.S. and Turkish forces, NATO allies, may find themselves in direct combat with each other. Far from giving Washington influence over key allies or improving their combat effectiveness, U.S. arms and training often simply spur further conflict and chaos to the detriment of the security of the United States, not to speak of the peace of the world.”