Mac Margolis, Newsweek‘s right-wing Latin America correspondent (Extra!, 1/10), has a small piece in the latest issue (3/1/10) that misleads in a big way. Under the headline “A Killer Deal for Russia,” Margolis declares:
Russia’s campaign to balance U.S. power and prestige around the globe has found a new and willing partner–Latin America–and Washington may be the unwitting facilitator…. Moscow is cutting deals across the region, selling the latest hardware, from rifles to fighter jets, in exchange for influence and access to the area’s plentiful oil and gas reserves.
And the United States has only itself and its pesky ethics to blame:
Ironically, one reason for the budding East/West axis may be Washington’s own rigid security agenda. The U.S. has imposed restrictions on arms sales to many nations suspected of being soft on terrorism or roiled by internal conflict. So, many on that watch list have turned to Moscow, which asks no questions. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for example, has snapped up some $4 billion in Russian weapons in recent years.
Reality check: The United States is by far the world’s largest arms dealer, making $37.8 billion in arms deals in 2008–68 percent of the world’s arms traffic for that year, according to the Congressional Research Service (New York Times, 9/6/09). Russia was a distant third with $3.5 billion.
And the United States did not actually limit its weapon sales to peaceful nations. Among countries “roiled by internal conflicts” that have bought U.S. arms in recent years are Colombia, Morocco, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Yemen, Armenia, Azerbaijan…. The list goes on. Apparently unlike Moscow, Washington does ask questions–like, “Is your credit good?”
Update: See Extra!‘s January 2010 cover story, “Newsweek’s Name-Calling Neoliberal: Meet Mac Margolis, Their Man in Latin America,” by Peter Hart–just released online.
The last link, “the list goes on” is broken.
matt, thanks–it should work now.
I have looked for many reasons justifying the USA lead in the arm’s business. I guess it started with our proven capability in response to the needs of WWII, where we clearly outproduced every country and supplied almost the entire allied effort, then continued following the war’s end and through the cold war in competition with a recovering Russia to impede their socialist empirialism that resulted in the Korean Police Action, as it was referred, that eventually led Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the end of his presidency, to warn us of the unfettered growth and influence of the Military Industrial Complex. That MIC continued growing its influence in their support of future presidents. Reagan, in particular, was almost entirely supported by the new big air “defence” industries in the West Coast that continued, with the old established naval “defence” industies of the East Coast, to engage local communities throughout the country to become dependant on supplying labor, materials and parts to their major industrial operations. Even now, after the threat of socialist empirialism has been long gone, with President Reagan’s call to tear down the Berlin Wall, the Military Industial Complex is nurtured with developing bigger and more sophisticated weaponry, much of which becomes obsolete before ever being used. And with this nurturing came the corrupting innefficiencies of massively top-heavy corporations that were sustainably assured of their relative positions among their few competitors to obtain new and continuing projects. On the basis of constitutionally mandated national defence, they distorted that “defence” to be applied to defending our, (meaning USA,) interests abroad, to result in defending the business interests of a very few influential businessmen, nay profiteers, who positioned themselves to capitalize on existing or initiated conflicts in various foreign countries. This distortion continued to such an extent as to be neglecting the maintenance of our own resources and the maintenance and renovation of our infrastucture at home.
It remains way past time that we take the Military Industrial Complex and make it work for US, the Amercan people at home. Converting the industrial know how and management skills to restoring, renovating and retrofitting our existing structures, while applying that military focused innovation capability to the problems of efficiency associated with less polluting renewable energy, an innovation that our concentration on military development has made us fall behind many of the developed countries of the planet, even now including developing countries India and China.
Each of the small community MIC works throughout our country can be converted to local and regional infrastructure projects. All it takes is the recognition that the business interests of each community can now be directed back to US the Americans and not to the few profiteers who we have allowed to continue their private interest at the expense of the lives of our troops, our treasury and our public interest, which remains to continue the United States of America as the example of freedom in the pursuit of opportunity for all.
Did anyone mention Israel as the leading US arms recipient? Or is it Saudi Arabia?
Does it even matter, when there is no nation currently residing on planet Earth that does not either buy or sell weapons, which in turn are used to commit murders and attempt racial cleaning and/or genocide?
We humans have really come to a pretty basakwards sense of what makes for global peace, haven’t we …
I picture a caveman cold and hungry. Then the opening scene in the film “2001”. Then back to the caveman jealously eye-balling the fire and food next door, while his cranial wheels begin to turn. Ominously selfish.
I learned long ago that the US reliance on the MIC has rendered much of your electronics industry uncompetitive. These companies that have become so dependant on Pentagon no-bid contracts have never learned to control their costs, mainly because they didn’t have to, and so found that they could not compete with their Japanese and European competitors. Essentially, I found that many of these companies had developed the same kind of business culture one would has expected in the old Soviet Union.
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