Arming Peace – can a peaceful, unarmed people seeking to nonviolently overcome tyrany and build a Democracy or must they first buy arms from the Western black marketeers?
Democracy for Dollars
04/01/2011 – By Benjamin Bidder and Clemens Höges – Spiegel International
[excerpt]
Yesterday’s Friends
Indeed, Europeans have been fostering such business ties in a number of the Arab countries whose governments are now faltering. Great Britain’s Prince Andrew, for example, visited Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in San’a in late 2009. Over lunch at the royal palace, the prince-turned-government-trade-rep praised Yemen’s “unity, stability and development.”
Prince Andrew arrived in the country with investment money — and then suggested that Saleh could take care of his weapons needs in the British isles. Which the Yemeni president then did. Shortly after the prince’s trip, the British government authorized the sale of ammunition and bulletproof vests worth €183,000 to Yemen. These days, of course, Saleh’s security forces are busy firing at demonstrators. Two weeks ago, 52 protesters were killed in a single day.
Germany, for its part, has had well-established ties to Egypt for several years. In 2009, Germany provided equipment worth nearly €80 million; most of it was tank components and military electronics, but it also includes submachine guns. It’s unclear whether these ended up in the hands of the army, which sided with the people, or whether they became the property of the detested police. When unrest broke out there, Germany temporarily revoked arms export licenses to Egypt.
Fear, Jobs and Profits
Meanwhile, the United States thinks on a very different scale, especially when it comes to Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud has money to spend, and Washington wants to arm Saudi Arabia against Iran. But on Monday, March 14, Saudi troops marched into Bahrain to help put down the rebels there.
Last year, Washington announced the largest arms export deal in history: Saudi Arabia plans to buy aircraft worth $60 billion over the course of the next five to 10 years. Money is no object, and the Saudi air force is to receive F-15 fighter-bombers, Apache attack helicopters, missiles, radar equipment and bombs. All together, according to the Wall Street Journal, the order is large enough to guarantee 77,000 jobs at Boeing.
For an additional $30 billion, the Saudi royal family also plans to modernize its navy. To calm Israeli fears, the country will receive cutting-edge F-35 jets (also known as “Joint Strike Fighters”) that, if necessary, will be able to shoot the older Saudi F-15s out of the sky.
Eager Customers, Happy Investors
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) are similarly lavish in their spending — and equally afraid of their overly powerful neighbor Iran. According to a confidential diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi released by Wikileaks, the UAE’s sheiks have spent billion — but without clear planning or an “obvious master plan for an integrated defense network.” The emirates want to buy only the best, the cable continued, and “the shinier the better.”
The UAE’s militaries reportedly even ask — impatiently and often — for weapons that are still in the development phase, the cable added, only to discover that the weapons system they’re looking for “had not yet been invented.” The downside, the dispatch continues, is that the sheiks prefer not to put “all eggs in one basket,” so they also buy from France, Britain and even China.
Even so, in 2010, the UAE ordered $40 billion worth of weapons from the United States. To be able to shoot down Iranian missiles, they also want to buy America’s most modern air defense system. The Americans would be happy to set up similar systems in the entire region.
Give the situation, one can’t really blame investors for viewing the conflicts and revolutions in the Middle East primarily as a signal to buy. When the United Nations declared a no-fly zone over Libya, the armaments index on the New York Stock Exchange shot up by 5 percent.
Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein …Article
