Posted on 01/13/2008 7:15:34 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
The lucrative wages of selling weaponry to developing countries, US-style
By By Kaleem Omar
1/13/2008
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).
China is the leading recipient of conventional arms transfers, accounting for 3.6 billion dollars in purchases; followed by South Korea (1.9 billion dollars); India (1.4 billion dollars); and Oman (1.3 billion dollars).
Of the top 10 recipients, five are in the Middle East – Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman – and four in Asia, with Malaysia ranking eighth behind China, Korea and India.
Israel is the world’s biggest recipient of US economic and military aid, which averages about 4 billion dollars a year – most of it in the form of outright grants, unlike loans which have to be repaid. In the last 20 years, US aid to Israel has amounted to well over 100 billion dollars. And that’s not counting billions of dollars in US loan guarantees given to Israel.
In September 2003 the Bush administration approved another 10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel. However, the Palestinians – who have seen their economy shrink by over 50 per cent since 1999 due to a whole host of punitive economic measures imposed by Israel, including cutting off access to ports for Palestinian exports – have received a paltry 50 million dollars in aid from the United States.
The US recently pledged to give 500 million dollars to Mahmoud Abbas’ unelected Palestinian government, but has refused to give a single penny in aid to the democratically elected Hamas government because it refuses to recognise Israel.
This has resulted in the Palestinians’ economic plight becoming even worse and has further emboldened Israel to carry on with its repressive policies against the Palestinian people.
Chile, which in 2002 was ranked tenth in the list of arms recipients on the strength of a major purchase of advanced fighter jets from the United States, is the only country outside the other two regions – the Middle East and Asia – which have been the developing world’s biggest customers for conventional arms for the past decade.
While the Middle East proved the bonanza market of the 1980s – particularly when warring Iran and Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia, were making huge purchases, Asia – particularly China and India – was the big buyer of the seven-year period 1995-2002.
In that period, China ranked number one, with 17.6 billion dollars worth of purchases; the United Arab Emirates ranked second at 16.3 billion dollars, and India ranked third at 14.1 billion dollars, suggesting the emergence of a new arms race between the world’s two most populous nations that could dominate the market for some time, particularly if purchases to the Middle East continue to decline in relative terms.
With a nod from the United States, India has concluded a 2 billion dollars deal with Israel for the purchase of the three aircraft equipped with the US-developed Phalcon radar system, which has look-down capability and will give the Indian air force a big advantage over the Pakistan air force in controlling the skies. India is also negotiating with Israel for the purchase of the advanced Arrow missile system and several other weapons systems.
These growing military ties between India and Israel are a source of worry to Pakistan, which says that this acquisition of sophisticated weapons systems by India would alter the conventional weapons balance between India and Pakistan and destabilise the South Asian region.
This issue was also taken up by President Pervez Musharraf in his talks with US President George W. Bush in New York in September 2003. But then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in his intemperately worded speech to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2003 rejected President Musharraf’s charge that India was forcing Pakistan to engage in an arms race by building up its conventional and non-conventional military hardware.
“I would like to point out to the president of Pakistan that he should not confuse the legitimate aspirations for the equality of nations with outmoded concepts of military parity,” said Vajpayee.
Vajpayee’s fulminations notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that it’s easy for India to talk of military parity as an “outmoded concept” because it has much bigger military forces than Pakistan. If military parity is an outmoded concept, would New Delhi care to explain why India’s new-found ally Israel, by its own admission, has the “third or fourth” most powerful military in the world despite being such a small country?
Not only is the conventional arms balance in the Middle East heavily tilted in Israel’s favour, Israel is also the only country in the Middle East that possesses weapons of mass destruction, with more than 400 nuclear bombs, according to the latest estimates. Yet so strong is the influence of the Zionist lobby in the United States that there has never been any move by Washington to impose sanctions on Israel for possessing nuclear weapons.
Washington also blocked discussion in the UN Security Council of a draft resolution tabled by Syria in June 2003 calling for the banning of all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. The reason for US intransigence on this issue was that it knew only too well that the only country in the Middle East that would be affected by the Syrian resolution was Israel.
The United States, which has sharply upgraded its military relationship with India over the last several years, particularly since the beginning of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism”, has made little secret of its hopes of integrating Delhi into a containment strategy against Beijing.
An annual report on arms transfers prepared by the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) is pored over by intelligence analysts around the world to glean key trends and possible future military threats to their governments. The CRS report tracks both actual deliveries of arms, as well as new agreements that will result in eventual deliveries.
The time between the signing of an agreement and actual delivery can stretch beyond a decade, depending on many factors.
In addition to covering the value of sales and deliveries each year and over periods as long as seven years, the CRS report also tracks the transfer by various countries of specific weapons systems.
The CRS report for 2002 found, for example, that a total of 80 surface-to-surface missile systems were transferred in 2002, none of which were supplied by the United States, Russia, China, the four major West European countries (France, Britain, Germany and Italy) or “all other European countries”.
Suppliers of the missiles were found in a category called “all others”, which includes North Korea, South Africa and Israel.
Washington never misses an opportunity to berate North Korea for selling missiles to other countries, but it has never criticised Israel for doing the same thing. There is, it seems, no end to US hypocrisy and double standards where Israel is concerned.
The overall trend in arms purchases by the developing world has been downward since the early 1990s, when countries that could afford them bought large quantities of advanced US weapons systems that were displayed during the 1991 Gulf War.
Following the 1990-91 Gulf War, and the subsequent reduction in US military spending under the Clinton administration, Washington bulldozed Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE into buying billions of dollars worth of arms from the United States in a move aimed at boosting sales of the US arms industry, which – before the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 reversed the trend – saw substantial cuts in the arms purchase budgets for the US’s own military.
In one such deal, concluded in 2000, the UAE bought 80 latest model F-16s from Lockheed Martin of Fort Worth, Texas, and related weapons systems for 8.6 billion dollars. In another deal, Saudi Arabia was pressured by Washington into buying 6 billion worth of fighter aircraft.
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