Abstract
One of the most important things your new administration can do to promote security, human rights, and peace in this fractious world is to put the brakes on America's arms-sales addiction. In 1999, the last year for which full statistics are available, the United States was responsible for 54 percent of international arms deliveries–more than all other supplier nations in the world combined.
The U.S. role as the world's leading merchant of death is a national disgrace. More often than not, U.S. weapons end up in the hands of dictators, thugs, and human rights abusers–not trusted allies who use them solely for defensive purposes, as the Pentagon and the State Department would have us believe. U.S. government-sanctioned arms trading is immoral, ineffectual, and reckless. The sooner the United States accepts those harsh realities and changes its current policy, the better off we'll be.
U.S.-supplied armaments have been used to carry out massive violations of human rights, ranging from the use of M-16 rifles by Indonesian-backed death squads in East Timor to the U.S. attack helicopters and F-16 fighter planes that bomb and burn Kurdish villages in southeastern Turkey. Research by the Washington-based organization Demilitarization for Democracy has demonstrated that throughout the 1990s, the vast bulk of U.S. weapons transferred to the Third World have gone to regimes that the State Department defines as undemocratic.
In Colombia, the United States is in the process of shipping hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment and training to a corrupt and repressive military that is engaged in a counterinsurgency war against left-wing rebels who get part of their funding from taxing coca production in the zones under their control. This subject received virtually no attention during the presidential campaign, but Americans need to know that these U.S. weapons are far more likely to be used against civilians than against drug traffickers, nor are they likely to help peacefully resolve Colombia's civil war. The small armies of U.S. “advisers” and private military companies that are flocking to Colombia to implement this U.S.-financed military buildup already outnumber the U.S. personnel that were dispatched to prosecute the disastrous U.S. involvement in El Salvador during the 1980s.
Despite the high risks involved in this new military adventure, the most agitated debates over arming Colombia on Capitol Hill had to do with which state–Joe Lieber-man's Connecticut or George W. Bush's Texas–would get to build a larger share of military helicopters (which make up the biggest single item in the aid package).
If a moral argument won't convince the United States to put the brakes on the arms trade, maybe self-interest will. In the rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape of the post-Cold War world, U.S. arms supplied to an ally routinely end up in the hands of a U.S. adversary. In Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and to some degree even the Balkans, U.S. troops have faced adversaries armed with U.S. military technology.
A DIFFERENT TAKE
“Determine the extent to which we can count on our allies in meeting the diverse range of future military chalf lenges…. Allies' capabilities shoulc be more effectively integrated into U.S. force planning.”
“Taking Charge, Bipartisan Panel Offers National Security Action Plan for the President-Elect,” Rand Corporation report
The “boomerang effect” has been most severe in the case of the Afghan rebels, who were targeted to receive an estimated $6 billion in U.S. weapons during the 1980s, presumably for use in their war to eject Soviet forces from Afghanistan. Instead, much of the weaponry was diverted to the international arms market, or to jiha-di schools–where extremist, right-wing fundamentalists from around the world learned military skills that they took back with them to wage war on established governments in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Tajikistan. [For more on jihad and religious schools in Pakistan, see “Meeting with the Muj,” page 42.]
Many of the high-profile terrorist acts against U.S. facilities and U.S. citizens in recent years–including the terror bombings of the World Trade Center, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the recent attack on the uss Cole in Yemen–can be traced back to networks of Afghani “freedom fighters” who received much of their training and many of their weapons at U.S. taxpayer expense during the 1980s.
Despite the moral, political, and security risks posed by runaway arms trafficking, neither major party made an issue of it in the elections. That could be because the political mentors of the major party candidates–Presidents Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush–were themselves major league arms dealers who invested billions of dollars of public funds and a considerable amount of their own personal time and energy in promoting U.S. weapons exports.
The fact that the weapons industry has poured more than $59 million into federal campaigns over the past decade may also have something to do with the reticence of the major parties on this issue.
In mid-November, while the nation was still awaiting a final count in the presidential race, Congress quietly passed a bill that would give $300 million in new tax breaks to U.S. arms exporters–on top of the $7.5 billion in government support they already receive from grants, subsidized loans, and marketing assistance.
Not only is the U.S. arms industry making the world a far more dangerous place, U.S. taxpayers are forced to foot the bill. If President Dwight Eisenhower, who took the occasion of his farewell address to the nation in January 1960 to warn of the growing influence of the military industrial complex, were alive today, he would be shocked to see how much influence U.S. weapons makers still wield, more than 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the (always exaggerated) “communist threat.”
How did we get into this mess? Going back two decades–before polls, focus groups, and fundraising had fully taken over national political life–candidates for the presidency of the United States actually engaged in principled debates over substantive foreign policy issues. For example, when Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976 as a Washington outsider–a tactic adopted with some success by George W. Bush in the 2000 elections–he promised to restore integrity to the White House. But Carter's notion of integrity involved specific commitments to pursue more ethical public policies, not vague promises to observe higher standards of personal conduct than the man he was hoping to succeed as president.
“Waiting period? No, that's only for handguns.”
Perhaps the best known theme of Carter's campaign was his pledge to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Carter roundly denounced the U.S. role as the world's leading arms merchant, asserting in a June 1976 speech that “We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.”
Carter returned to this theme throughout the campaign. During the closing statement of his nationally televised debate with Gerald Ford on October 6 of that year, Carter suggested a radical change in direction: “Can we become the breadbasket to the world instead of the arms merchant to the world? I believe we can and we ought to.”
“When push came to shove, Carter was not able to fulfill his pledge to rein in the arms trade. Pressure from members of Congress with weapons plants in their districts, combined with opposition from administration hardliners like National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, forced the Carter administration to abandon its arms-sales restraint initiative. One effect was that planned U.S.-Soviet negotiations on limiting arms sales to regions of potential conflict like the Middle East and East Asia were scuttled.
A DIFFERENT TAKE
“Acknowledge that the risks that Colombia poses to regional stability in Latin America and U.S. interests in general justify treating Colombia not just as an extension of the war against drugs, but also as a national security issue.”
“Taking Charge, Bipartisan Panel Offers National Security Action Plan for the President-Elect,” Rand Corporation report
Carter was succeeded by Ronald Reagan, a man who never met an arms deal he didn't like. Throughout the 1980s U.S. arms sales skyrocketed as the government put on a full-court press to sell or give away weapons large and small to clients in all corners of the globe, from advanced awacs radar planes to Saudi Arabia to combat rifles and shoulder-fired missiles to Reagan's beloved right-wing “freedom fighters” in Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Then came George Bush the elder and Bill Clinton, who commercialized U.S. arms exports by creating new, innovative government subsidies for weapons sales and putting government personnel to work as virtual sales representatives for military contractors.
There is no lack of ideas on curbing weapons exports, just a lack of political will. Ideas worth supporting include Georgia Democratic Cong. Cynthia McKinney's proposal for a binding Code of Conduct on U.S. arms sales that would severely curtail exports to dictators and human rights abusers; a gradual phasing out of all U.S. government subsidies for arms sales; and a determination to play a more constructive role in international efforts to limit the trade in small arms.
But first we need a president–and a Congress–who are willing to take steps to restore integrity to U.S. foreign policy by ending the shameful role of the country as the world's leading arms merchant.