America Fuelling War Through The Arms Trade

[MelT]

America’s military is the country’s biggest business. According to the House Budget Committee, in 2000, defense expenditures represented 16 percent of discretionary federal spending. Excluding entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, all nondefense spending combined was only 19 percent of the federal budget. In the Department of Defense’s most recently published report, the 2001 defense budget will be more than $300 billion, of which $60 billion would be spent on procurement and almost $40 billion on research and development. The budget for national defense is expected to exceed $360 billion by 2006.

— <CITE>Mark Williams and Andrew P. Madden, New technologies may revolutionize war, Red Herring, August 1, 2001</CITE>

A report from the <CITE>World Policy Institute</CITE> released mid-2005 has found that the U.S. is routinely funneling military aid and arms to undemocratic nations. In 2003, for which the most recent data was available at the time,

• The United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts;
• More than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13) were defined as undemocratic by the State Department;
• When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003—a full 80%—were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

As mentioned above, the “War on Terror” has seen the U.S. selling weapons or training to almost 90% of the countries it has identified as harboring terrorists. Yet, for decades, a lot of the arms that the West has sold has gone into the hands of military dictatorships or corrupt governments. For example, in 1998, 14 Billion dollars worth of sales were made by the USA, a third of which went to known human rights abusers.

• According to a report, from the Council for a Livable World’s Arms Trade Oversight Project, “[s]ince the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s largest arms dealer … Consequently, governments with some of the worst human rights records [have] received American weapons and training.”

Bribery in the arms trade has not subsided since the end of the Cold War. On the contrary, as military spending has been cut back the arms firms have been seeking markets abroad more fiercely than before…. One recent estimate reckons that in the international arms trade “roughly $2.5 billion a year is paid in bribes, nearly a tenth of turnover.”

[With regards to corruption,] the relevant feature of arms trade is that … government ministers, civil servants and military officers have become so intimately involved in the arms export business that they must have been unable to avoid condoning bribery (for examlpe, by turning a blind eye to it), if not encouraging it (for example, by providing advice when serving in embassies oversease about which members of the local hierarchy it was best to approach and how); or obtaining funds from it for the benefit of themselves, or in the case of politicians, for their political party.

http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/BigBusiness.asp#TopRecipientDevelopingNations

Much of the Bush family fortunes (and indeed many others worldwide, including the Bin Ladens who the Bushes had close dealings with prior to 9/11) are made from the sale of arms.

MelT

[Rasta_Man]

are you suggesting that the U.S. government is being less-than fully trustworthy and using their power to generate a hugley profitable arms organization?

Your a nutcase!

[MelT]

Originally Posted by Rasta_Man

are you suggesting that the U.S. government is being less-than fully trustworthy and using their power to generate a hugley profitable arms organization?

Your a nutcase!

Whooo...just what I needed, a reality check....Maybe I'm just doing too many drugs, y'know? But I have seen the error of my ways, and I know now that my government will always acts in my best interest. Hey, it's what we pay them for innit?



MelT