Uncategorized

Big Dollars at Stake In Western Arms Sales to Autocrats

By Adam Sorensen | @adamsorensen | February 23, 2011 | +

By TIME contributor Mark Benjamin

Short of nuclear weapons technology, international arms sales don’t tend to attract too much public scrutiny. One exception is when it becomes painfully clear that those sales are helping to prop up brutal autocrats who suppress their citizens and when those weapons are allegedly put to use by autocrats to kill citizens who seek democracy.

The United States is now reviewing billions in military assistance and weapons sales to countries caught up in the whirlwind of protests and revolts in the Middle East, according to the Wall Street Journal. A law called the Leahy Amendment requires the United States to review arms sales to security forces committing human rights violations.

There are big dollars at stake. The Journal says Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan are expected to spend $70 billion on defense this year. The Obama administration has pushed hard for those arms sales in an effort to isolate Iran, a strategy that looks increasingly like choosing one autocrat over another. The paper says military officials think Washington could always cut off the spigot by refusing to send spare parts for those weapons should an unfriendly regime take control. The same article, however, notes that Iran still flies U.S. fighters provided to the Shah, who fell from power in 1979.

The United States’ arms deals aren’t the only ones looking short-sighted in light of the protests in the Middle East. A Feb. 17 report from the British arms control group Campaign Against Arms Trade says that in 2010, the U.K. approved arms exports to Bahrain of “tear gas and crowd control ammunition, equipment for the use of aircraft cannons, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and sub-machine guns.” The group says the British government also approved millions in exports to Libya of “wall and door breaching projectile launchers, crowd control ammunition, small arms ammunition, tear gas/irritant ammunition, training tear gas/irritant ammunition.”

Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that the U.K. had canceled some sales “after a warning from a legal adviser to the UN Commission on Human Rights who suggested that Britain may be found guilty of ‘complicity’ for the killings of protesters by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.”

Related Topics: Uncategorized

  • Latest on Swampland

    2012 Election May 25, 2012

    The Phony War: Obama and Romney Are Debating Character, Not Policy

    More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.

    From our Partners

    Obama Administration Blocks Global Health Fund To Fight Disease In Developing NationsHuffPost Politics

    Barack Obama May 25, 2012

    Audacity of Dope: Tales of a Toking Teenage Obama

    We knew Barack Obama smoked weed in high school because he wrote about it in his books. What we didn’t know, until Buzzfeed posted these choice nuggets (I’m so sorry) from David Maraniss’s new book on the President’s younger years, were the giggle-worthy details of his “Choom Gang” lifestyle, which are right out of a buddy stoner flick. Obama and his friends drove around the lush Hawaii countryside, hot-boxing their VW bus and re-upping with a long-haired pizza-tossing dealer named Ray, whom Obama thanked in his yearbook “for all the good times.”

  • fhmadvocat

    It is just as Ike warned us over 50 years ago, the Military-Industrial Complex at work.

  • square1

    Short of nuclear weapons technology, international arms sales don’t tend to attract too much public media scrutiny.

    Fixed.

    There is no support for arms sales other than to NATO countries (and divided, but significant support for sales to Israel). No American who isn’t a defense contractor or a bought politician supports billion dollar arms sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, or any number of dubious countries.

  • pintortwo

    I get the feeling that our policy of arms sales is significantly impacted by profit and graft. Take Egypt, to whom we provided aid which they used to buy weapons from us– not only did we hear rumors that Mubarak had billions stashed away, but the sales themselves must be a terrific pay-day for the weapons contractors and the lobbies representing them. I’ve linked to this before, but it’s shocking to me:
    .
    (Foreign Agent Registration Act) filings show that the U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relation benefits American military contractors. The United States ships aid dollars to the Egyptian government, which in turn buys pricey items from American contractors, with deals often arranged with the help of U.S. lobbyists–who sometimes represent both the seller and the buyer. That’s what PLM Group, a joint venture of the Podesta Group and the Livingston Group, did, as we reported with ProPublica in our initial release:
    .
    “Lobbyists for Egypt had at least 279 contacts on military issues, the bulk of which occurred when PLM Group accompanied delegations of Egyptian military officers to meet members of Congress, administration officials and representatives from defense contractors including BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. All five have done business with the Egyptian government, selling tanks, fighter jets, howitzers and radar arrays to its military. At the time of the meeting with the contractors, Podesta Group counted BAE Systems, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin among its clients, while the Livingston Group represented Raytheon.”     -link
    .
    What a racket. The con appears to take precedent over security– Egypt is not threatened by another nation, they are tasked with minding a border.

  • http://coldale.wordpress.com coldale

    The arsenals, armories and military establishments of the Middle East are bursting with American MI tanks, F16 warplanes, cluster bombs, missiles, automatic weapons, land mines, rockets, drones and, in the case of Israel, up to 400 nuclear weapons. This is a policy of self-interest that is so short-sighted as to be virtually unbelievable.

    One day, maybe next week, next month or next year – the Middle East will explode in a fireball, a nuclear fireball which will engulf the region and spread swiftly to Europe and across the world. Does America in its simplicity believe that radiation will not cross the Atlantic or that China, Russia and Pakistan will stand by and watch.
    The status quo reads like a children’s story book of evil intent, great stupidity and unbelievable innocence.

    WAKE UP AMERICA! The US is not an island with an invisible shield that will protect 308 million Americans when the Middle East blows up.

blog comments powered by Disqus