War on terror a booming business

The GWOT Sucks Up Big Money

July 5, 2007

Between September 2001 and June 2006, the US government spent a total of $432 billion in conducting what President Bush has labeled a "global war on terrorism". That staggering amount isn't the entire expense, however, as an unknown amount is also funding covert operations across the globe.

And that's just the American expenses in what neoconservatives like to call "The Long War". They've stopped using that name in public – it's a bit too realistic, even for some of the warhawks in this country – but the desire for empire that lies behind that massive diversion of US taxpayer dollars remains as constant as ever.

That money is just part of a growing global trend of spending the national treasury on national militarization, but it's American military-backed imperialism over the past five decades that has fueled much of that spending. During that period America has been the largest military spender in all but a few years and consistently is the top seller of weapons in the world.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, world military expenditure in 2006 – the total cost of maintaining armies across the globe – is estimated to be at least $1.2 trillion in current dollars. That's a 3.5 percent increase over 2005 and a 37 percent increase since 1997.

That's the recorded amount, the amount that can be tracked and confirmed. It doesn't include the illegal, unrecorded arms trading that may rival the legitimate trade in size and scope. It also doesn't count the huge number of bribes and quid-pro-quo payments from deals that go down all across the planet, like the Iran-Contra weapon-cash-cocaine-hostage exchanges made during the Reagan administration with the Iranian government and with people in Nicaragua who were either "rebels" or "freedom fighters" or "terrorists", depending upon one's perspective.

Not included as well would be the alleged bribe this year of one million British pounds by arms company British Aerospace Systems to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia.

The Prince, of course, denies any wrongdoing. He issued a statement saying that the payments into accounts controlled by Bandar at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., were the equivalent of official Saudi government funds and were approved by the Saudi ministry of defense. In the Prince’s view, that makes the bribe perfectly legal.

It’s not new behavior for BAE, whose 2006 annual report states, "BAE Systems is the world's premier global defense and aerospace company" with a profit of over 1 billion pounds from total sales of more than 13.5 billion pounds. In 2002, they paid a 7 million pound bribe to the foreign minister of Qatar to help grease the ways for BAE to sell weaponry to that oil-rich country.

Secret projects don't count towards the total in the Stockholm study, either. It's no longer a secret that the CIA has already helped launch operations inside Iran. President Bush signed a "non-lethal presidential finding" to conduct covert operations against the Iranian government as part of a $75 million effort this year that includes attempts to manipulate the Iranian economy, but an unknown amount is being spent in covert operations that haven't been publicly acknowledged.

The SIPRI Arms Transfers Project states that $129 billion was spent worldwide last year in acquiring weapons. That's just the cost of buying hardware and software; it doesn't include the vast amounts of money spent developing and producing all of that hardware.

Although the world arms trade is a steady market, there are some odd statistics revealed in the SIPRI data:

Once again US arms companies were the world's top supplier of weapons, selling three times the amount of Russian companies last year. China and India remained the largest arms importers in the world.

While much media attention was given last year to arms purchases by Iran, mainly from Russia, deliveries of weapons from the US and Europe to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were significantly larger than Iran's imports.

Although they still buy a lot of US weaponry, total arms sales to Saudi Arabia have dropped steeply since the Bush administration took office. The Saudis bought more American weaponry during any single year of the Clinton administration than they bought during past six years altogether.

That last bit of data, however, may be a meaningless statistic, since we also sold a lot of weapons to the Swiss under Clinton while we've sold them very little during the Bush years.

Surprisingly, we sell more weapons to the Netherlands than we do to Pakistan, which gets most of its weapons from China, France and the Ukraine. But the US has sent $10 billion in aid and cash to Pakistan during the past six years, which undoubtedly helped fund some of those other weapons purchases.

Because Russia has a limited internal market, most of their weapons production is exported, with a lot of weapons going to Sudan during the past six years.

Over the past 50 years, Turkey has been American manufacturer's most consistent customer, but Taiwan is the most prolific purchaser of US arms overall. During the past five decades we've sold lots of guns and ammo to South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In our second tier of steady customers are Israel, Greece and the UK.

We used to provide Iran with tons of weapons when the Shah was in power, especially during the last three years before that US-supported dictator was deposed and exiled to Palm Springs. One-fourth of the total of all weapons imported by Iran from all over the world during the past 56 years were US-made weapons purchased between 1976 and 1978.

We’ve never done much legal business with Iraq except during the Reagan years, when the rise of Saddam Hussein and his war against Iran coincided with American interests in that region. In 1986, the US was revealed to be selling arms to both sides of that Iran-Iraq war.

The SIPRI study lays out a clear description of the huge resources poured into war and defense preparations around the world. The study didn't calculate the cost of diverting talented minds, able bodies and expensive materials into weapons design and production instead of having them available to address societal and environmental problems. That amount probably can't be computed, but it's unquestionably a tremendous misuse of valuable resources at a critical time for humanity.

For more on the SIPRI Arms Transfers Project and its publications, visit them on the web at www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/.