O, Brother, Can You Spare An F-16

As a final post-Air Show rejoinder to the debates that have taken place, I wanted to post this blog piece from The Arabist - an Egyptian socialist blog - about the role of US arms sales [the pie chart on the left shows global shares of arms sales, excluding China] in the region. It's a good piece - and a very good blog for info on Egypt and the Middle East - and I will only add a couple of points here to that article, attached below.

The first is from a reuters article about growing US arms sales in the recession. It notes that the top purchasers of US weapons are dictatorships and human rights abusers:

"More than half of the top 25 U.S. arms purchasers in the developing world were 'undemocratic governments or regimes that engaged in major human rights abuses,' in 2006 and 2007, the [New America] foundation said in a report last week.

And also:

"He said his organization had found a 92 percent "correlation" between rising oil prices and rising U.S. arms sales."

The Wiki article on the arms industry has also some fascinating reading and is worth a visit. It notes, for instance, the importance of weapons to the Cold War when both the US and USSR used weapons transfers to win influence, particularly in the Third World. It then goes on to state:

"Since the fall of the Soviet Union, global arms exports initially fell slightly, but have since 2003 grown again, and now come close to Cold War levels.^[5] The United States is the overall top supplier of weapons. The United States is also the top supplier of weapons to the developing world, accounting for around 36% of worldwide weapons sales, followed by Russia, Britain, Germany, and China.^[6][7]"

*****

Oh Brother, Can You Spare an F-16
How the Middle East is providing recession protection for government-connected US weapons manufacturers:

WASHINGTON — Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.

The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before.

…
The increase in American weapons sales around the world “was attributable not only to major new orders from clients in the Near East and in Asia, but also to the continuation of significant equipment and support services contracts with a broad-based number of U.S. clients globally,” according to the study, titled “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations.”
Note that it’s not just Middle Easterners paying out of pocket for this, but also the American taxpayer who is underwriting some of these purchases in form of military aid designed to redirect US funding to those arms manufacturers. This is not just a question of US jobs in this sector, since many of these manufacturers collaborate with foreign firms, and of course their profits are shared among their global shareholders, not just American ones.

And it’s not just oil-rich states. The article adds:

The top buyers in the developing world in 2008 were the United Arab Emirates, which signed $9.7 billion in arms deals; Saudi Arabia, which signed $8.7 billion in weapons agreements; and Morocco, with $5.4 billion in arms purchases.

Morocco is a relatively resource-poor state that receives considerable amounts of aid (from the West and from Gulf allies) and faces no serious conventional threat; yet it has for instance decided to get a bunch of F16s. Its regional rival is Algeria, in the context of the Western Sahara conflict, and Algeria is itself making significant purchases (especially from Russia.) The silly arms race between Algeria and Morocco, two countries that have poor rankings in UN human development reports and deep socio-economic problems, is useful all around: for Moroccan and Algerian generals, for governments selling the weapons (thus cementing alliances and dependence relationships), and of course for the companies. In this context, it’s no surprise there is little genuine interest for solving the Western Sahara conflict or encouraging Moroccan-Algerian reconciliation.

In the Persian Gulf, one sees not only the patterns of dependence of absolute monarchies on this recycling of petrodollars into weapondollars (here’s more on the petrodollar-weapondollar coalition in the Middle East), but also the built-in interest in maintaining high threat levels and the possibility of war (for instance in talking up the possibility of an attack on Iran and its consequences).

Afghanistan Airstrike Kills 93. Enjoy The Air Show!

I was walking with my wife and daughter through Dufferin Grove Park earlier when, with an enormous boom, a fighter jet banked hard above us, then shot off down to the lake. Everybody looked up to see the plane and a woman walking her bike near us said: "In most countries we'd be running to hide from that plane."

When I got home and checked the news the truth of what she'd say struck home. Certainly there's some people in Kunduz, Afghanistan who are wishing that their relatives had run more quickly today because NATO dropped bombs killed 90+ people.

The story is that the Taliban hijacked a NATO jet fuel tanker, which then got stuck in the mud near a village. Villagers, all dirt poor, rushed out to siphon off some fuel from the truck. That's when NATO, called in by the German contingent in northern Afghanistan, dropped its payload.

Of course NATO feels bad and will look into it. They might even pay compensation to the families. But, if they hadn't been there it wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Ah, but we're there to bring democracy and freedom from the evil Taliban. Trouble is, the democracy is so utterly corrupt that even supporters of the occupation are embarassed by videos of Karzai supporters stuffing ballot boxes, reports of other boxes showing up full to polling stations, intimidation of monitors, etc.

And the Kunduz governor is hardly a progressive, having been allied with ultra-conservative Wahabbi followers, prior to shifting allegiances to a Tajik warlord named Daud, who is himself allied with Karzai running mate, Mohammed Fahim. As human rights watch described him:

“He is one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands from the civil war.” In fact, the brutality of his party Jamiat-e-Islami during the infighting amongst the mujahideen, following the Soviet withdrawal, drove many Afghans to support the Taliban. And the province has itself been a bastion of corruption and narcotic production.

"In February 2004, [provincial police chief] Motaleb Beg was captured by ISAF and Afghan police in Kabul with 300 kilos of heroin. Both Motaleb Beg and the heroin were handed over to the Kabul police with instructions how to handle the case. The following day the heroin had disappeared." (Beg was replaced as police chief by the present governor's brother, recently killed by an IED).
It is no wonder that with these characters in power, backed by western jets and bombs, the insurgency has spread north to the previously peaceful province of Kunduz. This is a big problem for NATO and the US because Kunduz is key to NATO's Central Asian supply lines. Previously, NATO had shipped equipment, fuel, etc. through Pakistan but insurgents in that country kept blowing stuff up. The alternative was to get an agreement from the Russians to move the same equipment, etc. through Russian airspace and then overland from Tajikstan and Uzbekistan. According to a senior US official: "The concern is if we don't stunt the [Taliban] growth, it could cause problems with our northern distribution network."

Things may already be too late, as Gul Agha, head of Baghlan-i-Jadid's criminal investigation department describes it: "Before, [insurgents] moved in very small groups. Now they are moving in groups of 30 to 40, and they have a leader of each group. They have a [shadow] governor, district leaders and recruiters."

Of course, the main people who are suffering as NATO increases air strikes in the north of the country, are civilians. Just as has been the case in the south, with bombings of weddings, funerals, and the like. The longer we stay over there, the more civilian dead there are and the more that we are hated.

This weekend, while you're watching those F-15's flying over the Toronto shoreline with your kids, just think about how a kid in Afghanistan feels when they see those same planes flying overhead. For them it's not a weekend diversion, it's the possibility of death at the hands of their supposed liberators.

All Air Show All The Time

I Hate The Air Show

I'm sitting here in my home office, trying to get work done and some assholes in fighter jets are buzzing over my house every ten minutes. As if there weren't enough reasons to hate imperialism.

Let's just put this into perspective. Over in Afghanistan, the daily experience of farmers and city dwellers alike is to experience low flying jets disrupting their lives as well. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't just make it difficult to get work done, they live in fear that the next airplane will drop a bomb on their wedding or on their house.

Back home, here in Canada, the jets are supposed to provide entertainment to us and our children (?!). We look at them up in the sky and they are proof of what a great nation we are - and how great are the nations of other key military powers, particularly the USA and Britain. The awe and pride with which we are meant to be filled by the sight of these multi-billion dollar monstrosities, evidence of how low on the evolutionary ladder we still are, are to most people on the planet a source of fear.

Whether they are in Somalia, the Sudan, Iraq or Afghanistan - the sight of F-series jets mean that children will soon be dead.

Frankly, spectacles of militarism like the air show deserve to be picketed and shut down. The money spent to fly these airborne thugs around the world should be spent on building hospitals, schools and providing food.

It's particularly odious that they use Labour Day weekend as an opportunity to promote nationalism of the worst, most violent kind. This is the opposite of international solidarity. The union movement is responsible for a significant amount of money going into CNE coffers every Labour Day, as their members march into the CNE grounds. Perhaps it's utopian but I'd love nothing more than to see the union movement demand an end to the Air Show or they will take their 20,000 members elsewhere.

In the meantime, I wish these asshole would stop buzzing my house - using my tax dollars!