The right to sell and distribute arms

The people who prattle about the ease of obtaining non-automatic assault rifle look-alikes in the US should perhaps look at how easy it is for international arms dealers to move large quantities of real military hardware. The US, China, Russia and a host of other shady entities are selling weapons to anyone who wants them, or so it seems.

A secret $40 million deal to sell Russian-made weapons: 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of the AK-47; 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same gun with folding stock; and 5,000 PKM machine guns to Iraq without the US knowing about it, was just broken up in Italy by a task force investigating the Mafia. Does our pet government in Iraq want to use them against insurgents or does it want to sell them to insurgents, terrorists and militias? Despite our coy outrage about Iranian weapons coming into Iraq, there seem to be US weapons being used by other militias against the theoretically friendly government of Turkey and the less friendly government of Iran. No one seems to know where the 190,000 assault rifles and automatic pistols we lost track of went, or where the large inventory of explosives and weapons the US didn't think worth guarding went, but it's easy to imagine that they didn't wind up in the hands of the Iraqi army and police. It's easy to imagine that all these Russian weapons will disappear or be traded in when the US fulfills its plan to replace them with American Made M16's. It's not hard to imagine that the black market will swell like a two day old corpse in the Iraqi sun with Kalashnikovs for sale. It's hard to imagine that making Iraq a vast dumping ground for arms is doing much to stabilize the country or the larger theater of operations.

"It seems strange that a pro-Western government, supported by the U.S. Army and other NATO countries on its own territory, would seek Russian or Chinese weapons through questionable channels,"

said the Italian prosecutor. Yes it does, unless you're aware that the Raison d'être of the war on terror is to sell weapons and other hardware and services and to enrich various companies like the Carlyle group, Halliburton, Blackwater and all the middle men and smugglers and politicians and industrialists who get rich from the destruction and fear they spread.

Giving arms to those who can't afford it and then selling arms to those who then need to protect themselves from the people we arm; arming repressive dictatorships and arming the resistance movement; selling to our allies and to the people who oppose them. We pay for the guns, they keep the profits.

More gasoline for the fire please

Some things don't change. The US has a long history of supporting tyranny of the worst sort as long as it wasn't communist tyranny and as long as a country like Saudi Arabia with it's ritual beheadings, mutilations and brutal repression is willing to sell us oil, we will continue to give them weapons, even if some of those weapons might walk over the border into Iraq and shoot us in the bum.

It's looking like the 20 billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia is a done deal and there has been no talk of any requirement on the part of the Saudis to reform anything or to stop fomenting anti-American religious fervor, much less to put a halt to murdering their daughters for things considered normal in the real world. Saudi Arabia is a medieval country, but a medieval country that owns a big part of the Bush Crime Family; owns them so solidly that they can call our occupation of Iraq illegal when Americans are condemned for saying it. It's a medieval country that practices a degree of oppression almost unimaginable here, yet you won't hear any member of the Bush Crime Family telling us the world would be better off with a Saudi regime change or with some sort of Democracy. Instead we've made them the largest client of the US arms trade so that they can more effectively resist reform, practice Wahabbism and preach Jihad in the rest of the world.

In an e-mail to Raw Story, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said

“I believe that the $20B arms package just announced – and the diplomacy accompanying it – is a complete refutation of the Bush/Rice policy of refusing to coddle the autocracies of the Middle East,” Wilkerson said. “Because we are afraid of Tehran, we are willing to fund massively regimes whose interests are not only counter to our own but who are actively engaged in covertly undermining U.S. interests, from supporting anti-U.S. elements in Iraq to building and funding thousands of madrassas in volatile places like the Federally Administered Territories in Pakistan.”

I disagree in part. I think the Bush policy has been to coddle and protect their friends whether or not those friends mean our country well or ill. I think the Saudis see us as loathsome but profitable customers who will be replaced with bigger customers in due time, but Wilkerson is right that we are aiding and abetting our enemies.

If Bush somehow dreams that other mid-East nations can be persuaded to defeat and annex Iran if we sell them enough weapons and that we would benefit from it, then he is more of a dangerous idiot than I imagined. Add this story to the proposed sale of Iraqi oil to Israel and it is a public relations disaster that will surely fuel more insanity and terrorism and hatred.

There has been much written about the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton having made it hard for him to deal with emerging terrorism. I think that Impeachment may be the only remaining option for saving us all from the apocalypse Bush is hell bent to provide us.

Hoist by our own petard?

The Financial Times announces today that Chinese "armor piercing" ammunition is being used by the Taliban and the insurgents in Iraq. I'm almost surprised they didn't follow the government line as far as to substitute "al Qaeda" for insurgents.

I have become so accustomed to deceptive descriptions of arms and ammunition in the popular press that I usually ignore such terms as "armor piercing," "cop killer" and "military" but my real concern here is that the knee-jerk China bashing is obscuring the real problem of the international arms trade in which the US is a major participant, having supplied arms to the Middle East and other places of unrest for a long time. It's not unusual for a country to be attacked with weapons of it's own manufacture or that were made by an ally as, for example, Great Britain whose destroyer was sunk by a French Missile during the Falklands war. That incident did not result in a British assault on France, but then George Bush was not calling the shots as he is here, nor did Mrs Thatcher seek to expand that war on other fronts.

The US has sold arms to Iran and to Iraq as well as to dictators and warlords all over the world, many of whom sold them out the back door to more dangerous customers. It's a multinational problem but we are a factor in the problem and we are a country heavily influenced by the wants of the international military-industrial complex.

Until the major arms exporters, like the US, Russia, China, France and Israel decide to cooperate in making a serious effort to control arms proliferation, we will continue to be shot at by an international buffet of weaponry. Of course as the profits are so enormous, it's never going to happen.

Syrian Missile crisis?

Pandora may have unleashed a world of woes, but the woes unleashed by the Bush Family are a cash cow of unprecedented size for war profiteers: the corporations who get Carte Blanche no bid contracts and of course the arms dealers and manufacturers both Bush and Cheney are affiliated with. Both Russia and Saudi Arabia and perhaps China stand to profit substantially from the administration's lust to attack Iran, but who is concerned with the likely outcomes?

Syria, the end of whose nuclear program was vaunted as a benefit of Bush's attack on Iraq has a mutual defense pact with Iran and in an act that conjures up the Cuban Missile Crisis, has agreed to accept the installation of Iranian owned, Russian built missiles on their soil.

The threat to US troops in Iraq may not be as serious as the threat to Israel, but it will require more arms and equipment and more money in the coffers of the multinational military-industrial complex. That we have an administration with family and business ties to the arms trade gives me little confidence in their intentions. Iran is in the position where their only deterrent to invasion is a nuclear one and invasion seems ever more likely with warships amassing around them. Sales are brisk and getting better and when or if the nukes begin to pop and millions die and the world is changed, they can come out of their bunkers owning a much bigger chunk of what's left than those of us who don't have bunkers.

Bush is no Kennedy and who can be sure he really has any interest in preventing continued escalation of a war in the Middle East? He himself is besieged and his time is growing short. He has set up the mechanism to allow himself absolute, unimpeded power. All he needs is a national emergency and with his connections, that should be a snap.

Missile Vs. Missile

When I read James Carroll's piece in the Boston Globe today, it reminded me of something I saw in Mad Magazine at least 50 years ago near the dawn of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. The cartoon speculated about what was then called the anti-missile missile and a countermeasure to be called the ant-anti-missile missile. The path to the ridiculous is short and obvious, but to paraphrase the Gipper, here we go again.

Read about the invisible hand of Wolfowitz ( and the invisible sanity of Bush) here.