Gates Urges Arabs To Buy US Arms

By Steve Hynd

The Obama administration is following in the footsteps of the Bush one by whoring for U.S. arms manufacturers abroad.

In an interview with the al-Jazeera network to be aired on Monday (Sept 8), Gates said the United States still favoured diplomatic and economic approaches to the challenges posed by Iran and its nuclear program.

But, according to a transcript of the interview, Gates said: "One of the pathways to get the Iranians to change their approach on the nuclear issue is to persuade them that moving down that path will actually jeopardise their security, not enhance it.

"So the more that our Arab friends and allies can strengthen their security capabilities, the more they can strengthen their co-operation, both with each other and with us, I think sends the signal to the Iranians that this path they're on is not going to advance Iranian security but in fact could weaken it," he said.

Gates said he did not know how much US arms sales to the region now totalled, but disputed a $US100 billion ($A117.5 billion) figure cited by al-Jazeera as sounding "very high to me".

Al-Jazeera got that estimate from an August 23rd report by the New York-based Scott & Sullivan consulting firm - but that figure is for the next five years. The causes and effects of this buying spree aren't as clear cut as Gates would like them to be either.

"Even by the standards of past arms sales to the Middle East and Persian Gulf, traditionally one of the world's largest arms-buying regions, these are major arms transfers with the potential to significantly affect the regional strategic balance," says U.S. military analyst David Isenberg.

Critics note, too, that the United States is largely to blame for the current situation -- Iran's recent expansionist ambitions were the result of the Bush administration eliminating Tehran's enemies in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan.

And in that regard, another fear prevalent among the Gulf Arabs is that Iraq will collapse into civil war as the Americans withdraw their forces, and that the violence will likely spill over into GCC territory.

Developing nations and the Middle East in particular have long been targeted for arms sales, with U.S. sales outrunning the next five of its competitors. The figures from 2008 were shocking enough.

The United States accounts for nearly 50 per cent of all arms exports. Altogether, arms sales from all sources to developing countries make up about two-thirds of arms sales worldwide. US sales to Middle Eastern countries account for 76 per cent of its total arms sales in the eight years since 1999 and about the same percentage of all sales to the region from all sources in that period. This shows just how heavily dependent the US arms industry has become in recent years on exports to the Middle East.

New arms agreements with developing nations total about 20 billion dollars a year. Of this total, the US alone accounts for about 49.6 per cent.

The US is followed by Russia, which exports about 5.7 billion dollars worth of arms a year; Ukraine (which exports about 1.6 billion dollars worth of arms a year); Italy (which exports 1.5 billion dollars worth of arms a year); and Germany and France (each of which exports about 1.1 billion dollars worth of arms a year).

But this year's figures are more extreme still. Now the United States accounts for $37.8 billion or "68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar" and 70.1 percent of sales to the developing world, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

The growth in weapons sales by the United States last year was particularly noticeable against worldwide trends. The value of global arms sales in 2008 was $55.2 billion, a drop of 7.6 percent from 2007 and the lowest total for international weapons agreements since 2005.

And that's not even accounting for America's own arms purchases. Ian Welsh notes:

The US spends more on its military than the next 10 nations combined, and more naval tonnage than the next 13 navies combined.  For this the US gets an army which, sorry American jingoists, is bloody awful at brushfire wars...The US cannot afford its current military.  The budget should be cut in half, at a minimum.  That budget, and the huge distortions that the military industrial complex is inflicting on America, are a large part of what is destroying America as an economic power. 

...Go back to a pre-WWII army, with a relatively large navy (though not as large as what you have, which is over 50% of the entire world�s naval tonnage).  You�ll be fine.  Honest.  And so will the world.  The world is not being made safer by US brushfire wars and neither is America.

And hey, maybe you can take the money and give yourselves real universal healthcare as opposed to some garbage bill that forces you to buy insurance you can�t afford to use.

But Ian also suggests that the White House may be looking on all this military purchasing as a form of economic stimulus - and screw the consequences. Certainly, arms manufacturers are doing well through the recession on the back of all this weapons buying and that has some knock-on effect into other manufacturers who repurpose themselves to feed the military-industrail beast. Nathan Schneider suggests the same thing.

Our military-industrial complex therefore stands to benefit not only from wars we ourselves wage, but also those of our client states. This is nothing new; U.S. industry has long profited from the conflicts of others. But, in today's desperate economic times, such practices can proudly display themselves as "recession-proof" devices of recovery. And it certainly seems safer to depend on other people's wars than on our own.

These trends need to be taken for the threat to national and international stability that they are.

Indeed they do. The lack of morality implicit in fuelling war abroad to stave off economic hardship at home should be clear enough, but for those who might not see that, or not care what happens to non-Americans, then they might condier that there will inevitably be a point of diminishing returns where the economic stimulus effect of warmongering is more than offset by the costs of fighting those wars, since even proxy wars have an alarming tendency to find their way home. Many would say that the current debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq are perfect examples of this, and have already taken America past the tipping point. Does the U.S. really want to set up another such debacle involving Iran and the Gulf States? Or worse still, one involving India, Pakistan and perhaps China for good measure?