In this provocative indictment of the U.S. arms trade, William D. Hartung reveals the greed, deception, and misguided thinking that fuel weapons sales abroad, poisoning our foreign policy and undermining our democratic institutions.
"The ongoing scandal at the heart of U.S. foreign policy is that the United States government has become world arms dealer number one," Hartung writes. The American role in the arming of Saddam Hussein's Iraq is by now well known, as are the unsavory machinations behind the Iran/Contra affair, but Hartung persuasively shows that such attempts to achieve policy objectives through weapons sales, far from representing isolated misjudgments, have become a staple of U.S. diplomacy throughout the world.
Hartung's lively analysis takes us behind the scenes to events such as a 1991 conference on "Defense Exports in the Post-Desert Storm Environment," which brought Pentagon and State Department officials, arms industry executives, corporate lobbyists, and foreign customers together to rub shoulders and attend panels on such topics as how to influence the development of arms export laws. From the Gulf War to the current state of armed chaos in Somalia, And Weapons for All demonstrates in compelling detail that U.S. reliance on arms exports as a policy tool is as shortsighted as it is heavy-handed.
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From the Publisher:
"An impressively researched and powerful critique of how conventional arms exports over the last quarter-century have become an increasingly important tool of U.S. foreign and economic policy."--Washington Post Book World
From Publishers Weekly:
Hartung, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in Manhattan, grapples with a vital question: how did the world's leading democracy become the world's leading arms merchant? He contends that President Nixon's arms-sales policy, President Reagan's support of anti-communist "freedom fighters" and President Bush's military assistance to Saddam Hussein all contributed to a grotesque "boomerang effect" in which recent U.S. battlefield opponents--Panama, Iraq, Somalia--have been armed with U.S. military technology. Hartung examines what he calls the permanent arms-supply network (defense contractors, former military and intelligence operatives, foreign brokers and middlemen and influential government officials) and suggests that their collective influence over U.S. foreign policy may exceed that of Congress. There is an urgent need, he warns, to break America's economic dependence on weapons exports, to cease arming potential adversaries and to control arms trafficking that spreads violence and disorder around the globe. A coherent, convincing exposition of a complex and timely subject.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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- PublisherHarpercollins
- Publication date1994
- ISBN 10 0060190140
- ISBN 13 9780060190149
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages341