THE ARMS trade is a booming business. Each year, more money is spent around the globe on the weapons and military expenditures than anything else--more than social services, agriculture, health care, even the drug trade.
But if you think that the biggest seller of the world's weapons is a "rogue" nation or one of the countries on George Bush's "Axis of Evil," guess again.
The biggest arms dealer in the world--for decades running--has been the U.S. government. From 1996 to 2003, the U.S. supplied about 40 percent of the world's weapons each year. By comparison, Russia, the second biggest arms pusher, supplied about 15 percent.
During that period, the U.S. sold more than $100 billion worth of weapons--everything from small arms to land mines to ballistic missiles. The buyers were governments around the globe, through both direct Foreign Military Sales (direct sales by the U.S. government to various government) and Commercial Sales (sales by U.S. companies to foreign governments, with the approval of Washington).
For all of the Bush administration's rhetoric about fighting the "war on terror," according to a recently released report from the World Policy Institute (WPI), some of the U.S. government's largest customers are involved in active conflicts--sometimes with each other.
"In 2003," the report states, "the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts. From Angola, Chad and Ethiopia, to Colombia, Pakistan and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest U.S. arms sales programs (Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales) to these conflict nations totaled nearly $1 billion in 2003, with the vast bulk of the dollar volume going to Israel ($845.6 million)." |
