#...They got guns, we got guns, all God's chillun got guns...# posted by Richard Seymour

Hey kids! Want to make the world more dangerous? Want to reduce your chances of living to a ripe old age like grandpa? Well, fret not! According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade , Britain continues to beef up some of the biggest bullies and warmongers in the world. And luckily, they're making a hobby out of supplying both sides of many conflicts:

The Government's Annual Report on the UK's Strategic Export Controls in 2003, published today, reveals that, yet again, the UK arms the world's trouble spots.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office's strategy paper predicts that for the next ten years: "Serious flashpoints are likely to remain and may intensify between India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait". But the Annual Report shows that these destinations are important clients of the UK arms industry. In 2003 licences were issued for the export of £86.5 million of UK military equipment to India; £29.5 million to Pakistan (almost double that for 2002); £47 million to South Korea; and £24 million to Taiwan. The Middle East remains a major destination for UK arms exports - in 2003 equipment worth £189.33 million was shipped to Saudi Arabia; £42.37 million to Turkey and around £25 million each to the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Indonesia is still being supplied with components and spares for equipment it has used in the war in Aceh and for human rights abuses in the past. In its recent report the parliamentary Quadripartite Committee said that the UK Government does not seriously monitor the use of UK equipment by the Indonesian military.

You can read the government's report here.

Strangely enough, the CAAT doesn't make as much of the numbers of small arms and weapons being sent to the Middle East as it might (by far the largest recipient of these weapons is the Saudi oligarchy). As Stephen Zunes points out in his book, Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, (2003), the super-arming of Arab nations is one of the many things contributing to their destabilisation. First, because it is an immensely costly enterprise for Arab states, depriving them of resources with which to meet the needs of the population increasingly exposed to joblessness and ever deteriorating education and health facilities. Second, because it involves the usual positive feedback loop - every time these guys get more weapons, we have to get some; but now that we've got some, they've gone and got more, etc. To quote him directly:

The significance of U.S. arms transfers to the region becomes apparent in looking at the figures: For Fiscal Year 2003, 72% of U.S. foreign aid allotted to the Middle East was military as opposed to just 28% for economic development. The $3.8 billion in military aid is well over 90% of what the United States gives the entire world. Even more startling is that, on top of this aid, there is the far larger sum of arms purchases, totaling $6.1 billion in 2001, over half of the world's total. The United States gave or sold more arms to the Middle East than all other arms exporters combined, totaling more than $90 billion since the Gulf War. Weapons and their delivery systems are America's number one export to the Middle East, totaling nearly one-third of all exports to the region

...

Al-Qaeda believes that the Saudi regime is corrupt and evil in large part because the royal family has squandered its wealth for personal consumption and exotic weaponry while most Arabs suffer in poverty. They are further angered by the regime's tendency to persecute those who advocate for more ethical priorities. They are angry with the United States, therefore, for propping up such a regime. The U.S.-Saudi alliance, in Al-Qaeda's view, further illustrates the depravity of the Saudi rulers in their decision to allow American troops on what they see as sacred Saudi soil in order to keep the regime in power. Such a regime is anti-lslamic, from their perspective, and therefore needs to be overthrown.
Unfortunately for these Islamic radicals, the United States has dedicated itself for more than a half century to perpetuate the Saud family's hold on power. In 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abel-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Arabian kingdom that now bears his family's name, and forged the alliance that remains to this day: in return for open access to Saudi oil, the United States would protect the royal family from its enemies, both external and internal. So, the first challenge, in the eyes of Al-Qaeda, is to oust the United States from the region since it is the U.S. military that is keeping the corrupt Saudi regime in power. Given that AI-Qaeda is no match for the United States militarily, they therefore rationalize for the use of terrorism.
As a result, even putting aside moral arguments against backing such regimes as Saudi Arabia, there are serious questions as to whether the large-scale arms transfers and ongoing U.S. military presence in the Gulf really enhances American security interests. Rather than protecting the United States from its enemies, these policies appear to be creating enemies. (Zunes, pages 41 & 44, op cit).

That "special relationship" is fucking the entire world.