Date: August 3, 2006 7:09:29 AM PDT
Subject: [IPCUSA] Banking on War
Banking on War
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 02 August 2006
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Only the dead, said Plato, have seen the end of war. As true as this may be,
it does beg the question: why? Why is there so much conflict in the world?
Why are there so many wars? Ethnic and religious tensions have been casus
belli since time out of mind, to be sure. The collapse of the Soviet Union
and the end of the Cold War ruptured a framework that held for almost fifty
years, bringing about a series of conflicts that are understandable in
hindsight.
There is a simpler answer, however, one that lands right in our back yard
here in America. Why so much war? Because war is a profitable enterprise.
George W. Bush and his people can hold forth about the wonders of democracy
and peace, and can condemn worldwide violence in solemn tones. Until the
United States stops being the world's largest arms dealer, these words from
our government absolutely reek of hypocrisy.
Mr. Bush and his people did not invent this phenomenon, of course. The
United States has been selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of
weapons to the world for decades. In the aftermath of September 11, however,
American arms dealing kicked into an even higher gear. The Bush
administration, in 2003, delivered arms to 18 of 25 nations now engaged in
active conflicts. 13 of those nations have been defined as "undemocratic" by
the State Department, but still received $2.7 billion in American weaponry.
One example is Uzbekistan, a nation with an astonishingly deplorable record
of human rights violations. Thousands of people have been imprisoned and
tortured for purely political reasons, and hundreds more have been killed.
Still, that nation received $37 million in weapons from the United States
between 2001 and 2003.
In 2002, the United States sold almost $50 million in missile technologies
to Bahrain. In the same year, the United States sold hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of missile technology, rocket launchers, tank ammunition,
fighter jets and attack helicopters to Egypt. The United States has sold
millions of dollars worth of weapons to both India and Pakistan, two nations
that have been on the brink of war for years. This list goes on and on.
Analyze the list of the top twenty companies that profit most from global
arms sales, and you will see American companies taking up thirteen of those
spots, including the top three: Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop
Grumman. These arms dealers act in concert with the Department of Defense;
they exist as a sixth ring of the Pentagon.
The Associated Press reported last week that business for the arms industry
is, to make a bad pun, booming. "Northrop Grumman, the world's largest
shipbuilder and America's third-largest military contractor," reported the
AP, "said second-quarter earnings rose 17 per cent, as operating profit at
its systems and information technology units overcame a decline at the
company's ships division. Raytheon Co., the fifth-largest defense
contractor, reported second-quarter net income jumped 54 per cent, buoyed by
strong military equipment sales."
Beyond the missiles and the tanks and the warplanes, there is the small-arms
industry. This is, comprehensively, far more deadly than the large-arms
sales being made. A report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
describes the deadly situation:
Since the end of the cold war, from the Balkans to East Timor and throughout
Africa, the world has witnessed an outbreak of ethnic, religious and
sectarian conflict characterized by routine massacre of civilians. More than
100 conflicts have erupted since 1990, about twice the number for previous
decades. These wars have killed more than five million people, devastated
entire geographic regions, and left tens of millions of refugees and
orphans. Little of the destruction was inflicted by the tanks, artillery or
aircraft usually associated with modern warfare; rather most was carried out
with pistols, machine guns and grenades. However beneficial the end of the
cold war has been in other respects, it has let loose a global deluge of
surplus weapons into a setting in which the risk of local conflict appears
to have grown markedly.
The Federation of American Scientists prepared a report some years ago
detailing the vast amounts of small arms delivered to the world by the
United States. "In addition to sales of newly-manufactured weapons," read
the report, "the Pentagon gives away or sells at deep discount the vast
oversupply of small/light weapons that it has in its post cold-war
inventory. Most of this surplus is dispensed through the Excess Defense
Articles (EDA) program. Originally only the southern-tier members of NATO
were cleared to receive EDA, but following the 1991 Gulf war, many Middle
Eastern and North African states were added; anti-narcotics aid provisions
expanded EDA eligibility to include South American and Caribbean countries;
and the "Partnership for Peace" program made most Central and Eastern
European governments eligible for free surplus arms."
"Around 1995," continued the report, "large-scale grants and sales of
small/light arms began occurring. In the past few years (1995 - early 1998),
over 300,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers have been
offered up, including: 158,000 M16A1 assault rifles (principally to Bosnia,
Israel, Philippines); 124,815 M14 rifles (principally to the Baltics and
Taiwan); 26,780 pistols (principally to Philippines, Morocco, Chile,
Bahrain; 1,740 machine guns (principally to Morocco, Bosnia); and 10,570
grenade launchers (principally to Bahrain, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Morocco)."
We hear so often that this is a dangerous world. It is arguable that the
world might be significantly less dangerous if the United States chose to
stop lathering the planet with weapons. Much has been made, especially
recently, about the billions of dollars in weapons sales offered to Israel
by America. This is but the tip of the iceberg.
It is, at bottom, all about profit. We sell the weapons, which create
warfare, which justifies our incredibly expensive war-making capabilities
when we have to go in and fight against the people who bought our weapons or
procured them from a third party. This does not make the world safer, but
only reinforces the permanent state of peril we find ourselves in.
Meanwhile, a few people get paid handsomely.
In the end, it is worthwhile to remember that whenever you see George W.
Bush talking about winning the "War on Terror," you are looking at the
largest arms dealer on the planet. We can pursue cease-fire agreements, we
can topple violent regimes, but until we stop loading up the planet with the
means to kill, only the dead will see the end of war.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling
author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know
and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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