The
Pentagon as a global rifle
association By Tom Engelhardt
Given these last weeks, who doesn't know
what an AR-15 is? Who hasn't seen the
mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have
flooded this country, or tabulations of
accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted
that there are barely more gas stations nationwide
than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard
the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or
been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion
on gun control, or checked out the disputes over
how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last
time around?
Who doesn't know about the
National Rifle Association's suggestion to
weaponize schools, or about the price poor
neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present
expansive interpretation of the Second
Amendment? Who hasn't seen the legions of stories
about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter,
sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles,
have soared, ammunition sales have surged,
background checks for future gun purchases have
risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged
with customers?
If you haven't stumbled
across figures on gun violence in America or on
suicide-by-gun, you've been hiding under a rock.
If you haven't heard about Chicago's soaring and
Washington DC's plunging gun-death stats (and that
both towns have relatively strict gun laws), where
have you been?
Has there, in fact, been
any aspect of the weaponization of the United
States that, since the Newtown massacre, hasn't
been discussed? Are you the only person in the
country, for instance, who doesn't know that Vice
President Joe Biden has been assigned the task of
coming up with an administration gun-control
agenda before Barack Obama is inaugurated for his
second term? And can you honestly tell me that you
haven't seen global comparisons of killing rates
in countries that have tight gun laws and the US,
or read at least one discussion about life in
countries like Colombia or Guatemala, where armed
guards are omnipresent?
After years of
mass killings that resulted in next to no national
dialogue about the role of guns and how to control
them, the subject is back on the American agenda
in a significant way and - by all signs - isn't
about to leave town anytime soon. The discussion
has been so expansive after years in a well-armed
wilderness that it's easy to miss what still isn't
being discussed, and in some sense just how narrow
our focus remains.
Think of it this way:
the Obama administration is reportedly going to
call on congress to pass a new ban on assault
weapons, as well as one on high-capacity
ammunition magazines, and to close the loopholes
that allow certain gun purchasers to avoid
background checks. But Biden has already conceded,
at least implicitly, that facing a
Republican-controlled House of Representatives and
a filibuster-prone senate, the administration's
ability to make much of this happen - as on so
many domestic issues - is limited.
That
will shock few Americans. After all, the most
essential fact about the Obama presidency is this:
at home, the president is a hamstrung weakling;
abroad, in terms of his ability to chose a course
of action and - from drones strikes and special
ops raids to cyberwar and other matters - simply
act, he's closer to Superman. So here's a
question: while the administration is pledging to
try to curb the wholesale spread of ever more
powerful weaponry at home, what is it doing about
the same issue abroad where it has so much more
power to pursue the agenda it prefers?
Flooding the world with the most advanced
weaponry money can buy.
As a start, it's
worth noting that no one ever mentions the
domestic gun control debate in the same breath
with the dominant role the US plays in what's
called the global arms trade. And yet, the link
between the two should be obvious enough.
In the US, the National Rifle Association
(NRA), an ultra-powerful lobbying group closely
allied with weapons-making companies, has a strong
grip on Congress - it gives 288 members of that
body its top "A-rating" - and is in a combative
relationship with the White House. Abroad, it's so
much simpler and less contested. Beyond US
borders, the reality is: the Pentagon, with the
White House in tow, is the functional equivalent
of the NRA, and like that organization, it has
been working tirelessly in recent years in close
alliance with major weapons-makers to ensure that
there are ever less controls on the ever more
powerful weaponry it wants to see sold abroad.
Between them, the White House and the
Pentagon - with a helping hand from the State
Department - ensure that the US remains by far the
leading purveyor of the "right to bear arms"
globally. Year in, year out, in countries around
the world, they do their best to pave the way (as
the NRA does domestically) for the almost
unfettered sales of ever more lethal weapons. In
fact, the US now has something remarkably close to
a monopoly on what's politely called the
"transfer" of weaponry on a global scale. In 1990,
as the Cold War was ending, the US had cornered an
impressive 37% of the global weapons trade. By
2011, the last year for which we have figures,
that%age had reached a near-monopolistic 78%
(US$66.3 billion in weapons sales), with the
Russians coming in a distant second at 5.6% ($4.8
billion).
Admittedly, that figure was
improbably inflated, thanks to the Saudis who
decided to spend a pile of their oil money as if
there were no tomorrow. In doing so, they created
a bonanza year abroad for the major
weapons-makers. They sealed deals on $33.4 billion
in US arms in 2011, including 84 of Boeing's F-15
fighter jets and dozens of that company's Apache
attack helicopters as well as Sikorsky Blackhawk
helicopters - and those were just the highest-end
items in a striking set of purchases. But if 2011
was a year of break-the-bank arms-deals with the
Saudis, 2012 doesn't look bad either. As it ended,
the Pentagon announced that they hadn't turned off
the oil spigot. They agreed to ante up another $4
billion to Boeing for upgrades on their armada of
jet fighters and were planning to spend up to $6.7
billion for 20 Lockheed 25 C-130J transport and
refueling planes. Some of this weaponry could, of
course, be used in any Saudi conflict with Iran
(or any other Middle Eastern state), but some
could simply ensure future Newtown-like carnage in
restive areas of that autocratic, fundamentalist
regime's land or in policing actions in
neighboring small states like Bahrain.
And
don't think the Saudis were alone in the region.
When it came to US weapons-makers flooding the
Middle East with firepower, they were in good
company. Among states purchasing (or simply
getting) infusions of US arms in recent years were
Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman,
Tunisia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE),
and Yemen. As Nick Turse has written, "When it
comes to the Middle East, the Pentagon acts not as
a buyer, but as a broker and shill, clearing the
way for its Middle Eastern partners to buy some of
the world's most advanced weaponry."
Typically, for instance, on Christmas Day
in 2011, the US signed a deal with the UAE in
which, for $3.5 billion, it would receive Lockheed
Martin's Theater High Altitude Area Defense, an
advanced antimissile interception system, part of
what Reuters termed "an accelerating military
buildup of its friends and allies near Iran". Of
course, selling to Arab allies without offering
Israel something even better would be out of the
question, so in mid-2012 it was announced that
Israel would purchase 20 of Lockheed Martin's F-35
Joint Strike Fighters, America's most advanced jet
(and weapons boondoggle), still in development,
for $2.7 billion.
From tanks to littoral
combat ships, it would be easy to go on, but you
get the idea. Of course, US weapons-makers in
Pentagon-brokered or facilitated deals sell their
weaponry and military supplies to countries
planet-wide, ranging from Brazil to Singapore to
Australia. But it generally seems that the biggest
deals and the most advanced weaponry follow in the
wake of Washington's latest crises.
In the
Middle East at the moment, that would be the
ongoing US-Israeli confrontation with Iran, for
which Washington has long been building up a
massive military presence in the Persian Gulf and
on bases in allied countries around that land.
A Second Amendment world,
Pentagon-style It's a given that every
American foreign policy crisis turns out to be yet
another opportunity for the Pentagon to plug US
weapons systems into the "needs" of its allies,
and for the weapons-makers to deliver. So, from
India to South Korea, Singapore to Japan, the
Obama administration's announced 2012 "pivot to"
or "rebalancing in" Asia - an essentially military
program focused on containing China - has proven
the latest boon for US weapons sales and
weapons-makers.
As Jim Wolf of Reuters
recently reported, the Aerospace Industries
Association, a trade group that includes Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, and other weapons companies,
"said sales agreements with countries in the US
Pacific Command's area of activity rose to $13.7
billion in fiscal 2012, up 5.4% from a year
before. Such pacts represent orders for future
delivery".
As the vice president of that
association put it, Washington's Asian pivot "will
result in growing opportunities for our industry
to help equip our friends". We're talking advanced
jet fighters, missile systems, and similar major
weapons programs, including F-35s, F-16s, Patriot
anti-missile batteries, and the like for countries
ranging from South Korea to Taiwan and India.
All of this ensures the sharpening of
divides between China and its neighbors in the
Pacific amid what may become a regional arms race.
For the Pentagon, it seems, no weaponry is now off
the table for key Asian allies in its incipient
anti-China alliance, including advanced drones.
The Obama administration is already
brokering a $1.2 billion sale of Northrop
Grumman's RQ-4 "Global Hawk" spy drones to South
Korea. Recently, it has been reported that Japan
is preparing to buy the same model as its dispute
sharpens with China over a set of islands in the
East China Sea.
(The Obama administration
has also been pushing the idea of selling advanced
armed drones to allies like Italy and Turkey, but
- a rare occurrence - has met resistance from
congressional representatives worrying about other
countries pulling a "Washington", that is,
choosing its particular bad guys and sending drone
assassins across foreign borders to take them
out.)
Here's the strange thing in the
present gun control context: no one - not pundits,
politicians, or reporters - seems to see the
slightest contradiction in an administration that
calls for legal limits on advanced weaponry in the
US and yet (as rare press reports indicate) is
working assiduously to remove barriers to the sale
of advanced weaponry overseas.
There are,
of course, still limits on arms sales abroad, some
imposed by Congress, some for obvious reasons. The
Pentagon does not broker weapons sales to Iran,
North Korea, or Cuba, and it has, for example,
been prohibited by Congress from selling them to
the military regime in Myanmar. But generally the
Obama administration has put effort into further
easing the way for major arms sales abroad, while
working to rewrite global export rules to make
them ever more permeable.
In other words,
the Pentagon is the largest federally licensed
weapons dealer on the planet and its goal - one
that the NRA might envy - is to create a world in
which the rights of those deemed our allies to
bear our (most advanced) armaments "shall not be
infringed". The Pentagon, it seems, is intent on
pursuing its own global version of the Second
Amendment, not for citizens of the world but for
governments, including grim, autocratic states
like Saudi Arabia which are perfectly capable of
using such weaponry to create Newtowns on an
unimaginable scale.
A well regulated
militia indeed.
Tom Engelhardt,
co-founder of the American Empire Project and
author of The United States of Fear as well
as The End of Victory Culture, his history
of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with
Nick Turse, is Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050.
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