Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

In November 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton announced that he would make it his policy “to reduce the proliferation of weapons of destruction in the hands of people who might use them in very destructive ways.” In February 1995, President Clinton released his new arms export policies. They renewed old Cold War policies even though the Cold War had clearly ended, but they emphasized the commercial advantages of foreign arms sales. According to the Clinton White House, the United States’ arms export policies are intended to deter aggression; “promote peaceful conflict resolution and arms control, human rights, [and] democratization”; increase “interoperability” of the equipment of American and allied armies; prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missiles; and “enhance the ability of the U.S. defense industrial base to meet U.S. defense requirements and maintain long-term military technological superiority at lower costs.” 30One of the arms industry’s chief lobbyists commented, “It’s the most positive statement on defense trade that has been enunciated by any administration.” 31But despite the doublethink language of the White House, there are certain essential contradictions in arms sales policy that cannot be papered over. The Pentagon’s global industrial policy, which keeps its corporate support system in place and well funded, regularly overrides more traditional foreign policy concerns, creating many potential long-term problems that may, in the end, prove beyond all solution. Arms sales are, in short, a major cause of a developing blowback world whose price we have yet to begin to pay.

In many cases, for instance, the United States has been busily arming opponents in ongoing conflicts—Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and China and Taiwan. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the number-one “rogue” leader of the 1990s, was during the 1980s simply an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country’s oil reserves. Often the purchasing country makes its purchases conditional on the transfer of technology and patents, so that it can ultimately manufacture the items for itself and others. The result is the proliferation around the world not just of weapons but of new weapons industries. On January 10, 1995, former CIA director James Woolsey told Congress that weapons sales “have the potential to significantly alter military balances, and disrupt U.S. military operations and cause significant U.S. casualties.” 32Yet on August 27, 1998, in a typical example of the Pentagon shaping—or misshaping—foreign policy through arms sales, the Department of Defense announced the sale of several hundred missiles and antisubmarine torpedoes to Taiwan for $350 million. China naturally denounced the sale as a violation of agreements it had with the United States. The Defense Department’s response was, “The proposed sale of this military equipment will not affect the basic military balance in the region.” 33If that is true, why sell the equipment in the first place? Was it merely to enhance the balance sheets of several defense corporations to which the Pentagon is closely tied? If it is not true, why even bother to suggest that the balance of power is of any interest to the Pentagon?

In August 1996, then Secretary of Defense Perry called for an end to a decades-old ban on arms sales to Latin America on the grounds that most countries in the region were now democracies, so it is inconceivable that they would use newly purchased arms against one another. A year later, on August 1, 1997, the White House announced, “In the past decade, Latin America has changed dramatically from a region dominated by coups and military governments to one of democracy and civilian control. . . . Some Latin American countries are now addressing the need to modernize their militaries.” The Clinton administration thereupon authorized the sale of advanced American weapons to any and all buyers south of the border (except, of course, Cuba).

A staple of American thinking about foreign policy is that democracies pose no threat to other democracies. But if the countries of Latin America are now democracies, logically that should mean that they do not need to “modernize their militaries.” They might instead follow the example of Costa Rica, which since 1948 has had no military, only a civilian constabulary, and which is one of the most stable, peaceful countries in the area. Its former president, Oscar Arias, who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to multiple civil wars in Central America, is a strong opponent of the renewed American arms shipments. In 1999, he observed, “Americans have shown great concern about the reported loss of classified nuclear secrets to the Chinese. But they should be just as outraged that their country gives away many other military secrets voluntarily, in the form of high-tech arms exports. By selling advanced weaponry throughout the world, wealthy military contractors not only weaken national security and squeeze taxpayers at home but also strengthen dictators and worsen human misery abroad.” 34

When such contradictions are exposed, the Pentagon falls back on the argument that if it does not sell the arms to Latin America, some other country will. By analogy, Colombia might say to the United States that if it does not grow and sell cocaine to Americans, some other country will. When considered together, the extensive JCET training programs in the region and the new arms sales policy are undoubtedly undermining democracy in Latin America and moving several long-standing conflicts toward war. For example, for some time JCET missions have been training the army of Ecuador while the Pentagon has sold Ecuador military Black Hawk helicopters and A-37 combat jets. Only after the training and the sales were completed did the United States discover that Ecuador was planning to use these forces not against drug dealers and “terrorists” but for a war with Peru. 35

The United States has justified its contacts with the Ecuadorian military as a means to get to know its leaders personally and to develop long-term relationships of trust. But as Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory has observed, many in the Reagan administration and the Pentagon knew practically every crucial figure in the Salvadoran death squads, most of whom were graduates of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. This did not stop the Salvadorans from killing seventy thousand of their fellow countrymen, not to mention raping and killing four American churchwomen in 1980, acts the American ambassador to El Salvador and the secretary of state then covered up. One Salvadoran colonel whom the U.S. ambassador suspected of ordering the murders of the three nuns and a Catholic lay worker was, in 1998, living comfortably with his wife and children in Florida.

The economic benefits of arms sales have been vastly overstated. The world’s second-largest capitalist economy, Japan, does very well without them. In the late 1990s, the economy of Southern California started to thrive once it finally got beyond its Cold War dependence on aerospace sales. Many of the most outspoken congressional champions of reducing the federal budget are profligate when it comes to funding arms industries in their localities, often with the expectation of what future export sales will do for their constituents. In January 1998, then House Speaker Newt Gingrich added $2.5 billion to the defense budget for more F-22s and C-130s, which even the air force did not want (or need), only because they were partly manufactured in Georgia. In June 1998, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott added the construction of another helicopter aircraft carrier (that the navy insisted it did not need) to that year’s $270 billion defense appropriations bill because the ship was to be built at Pascagoula, Mississippi.