T A B L E+T A L K Latrell Sprewell -- dipshit or maniac? Your opinions on the firing of the $25 million NBA guard are wanted in Sports. D A I L Y+Q U O T E Boogie nights with Foxy Brown R E C E N T L Y The ayatollah who came in from the cold By Christopher Hitchens John le Carré's outrageous attack on Salman Rushdie keeps the flames of censorship burning (12/04/97) The great Arlington National Cemetery smear By Jonathan Broder When it comes to screwing Bill Clinton, nothing is sacred, not even the dead (12/03/97) A tale of two families By Earl Ofari Hutchinson Why is a white "miracle birth" a major news story and a black "miracle birth" a non-event? (12/02/97) America's Asian "Berlin Wall" has crumbled By Jonathan Broder Thanks to American Cold War politics, Asia has been fed a steady diet of undemocratic regimes and corrupt leaders (12/01/97) All in la familia By Barbara Renoud-Gonzales Drugs -- dealing, using, addiction -- are rampant in America's Latino families (11/26/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		purveyor of Catastrophe KHOMEINI, SADDAM, THE KILLING OF THE KURDS, WAR AFTER WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST -- ALL BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE U.S. ARMS TRADE. MAYBE IT'S TIME FOR WASHINGTON TO RETHINK ITS POLICY. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY JONATHAN BRODER Even without America's signature, the treaty to ban the use of land mines, signed in Ottawa on Wednesday, is a crowning achievement for a worldwide grass-roots group, the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Ban land mines. However, the U.S. has said it will stop using land mines everywhere except in Korea, and will come up with a plan to replace land mines there by 2006. Many analysts expect that continuing moral pressure will ultimately force the U.S. to sign the treaty. Could the same pressure from ordinary people be applied to a much larger threat to lives and peace -- the continuing deployment of large weapons systems, mostly by the United States, and particularly in the Middle East? This is a question posed by John Tirman in his new book, "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade" (Free Press). Tirman is executive director of the Winston Foundation, a Washington organization that funds peace projects around the globe. He writes that the Middle East conflict is the direct result of U.S. arms sales to the region. He notes that such sales to Iran in the 1970s encouraged the Shah to view all internal problems "as nails that required a hammer" -- an attitude that led to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Tirman argues that U.S. weapons sales to Israel, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have fostered similar mind-sets among their leaders, resulting in human rights abuses, corruption and policies that have undermined the very security that the weapons were meant to protect. Salon spoke with Tirman about the continuing effect of U.S. arms sales in the post-Cold War world and what can be done to get Washington to change course. You suggest that the chief reason Saddam Hussein is such an international menace is U.S. arms policies. Our problems with Iraq today are the direct result of them. After the Shah of Iran's fall in 1979, the United States, in a panic, began to sell weaponry to Iraq. It wasn't much, although we gave Iraq military assistance in less direct ways. One was real-time military intelligence during its war with Iran; when warplanes were taking off from bases in Iran, Iraq would learn it immediately from U.S. satellites. Another was $5 billion in U.S. agricultural credits, which Iraq used to buy weapons. The third was political credibility, which the U.S. gave Iraq by taking it off the list of countries that support terrorism and then recognizing it diplomatically. All this made it easier for Iraq to buy weapons from various vendors. There were also covert shipments from the U.S. of dual-use items, like trucks, some helicopters and computers through Jordan. A company in Rockville, Md., sold Iraq biological weapons agents. We repeated the same mistakes we had made earlier with Iran. The Iranian revolution was, in my view, the result of the militarization of the Shah's regime, the corruption, the diversion of resources, the pro-Western vassalage. All the things that can be described as part of the U.S. arms trade. Now we're making the same mistake in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And that is something that you don't read in the media coverage of the current crisis with Iraq. No one has gone back to look at the roots of this crisis. It's as if history began on Aug. 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It didn't. Some would say the destabilization has been caused by America's total support of Israel. We should reexamine our arms sales to Israel. They have encouraged Israel to see all of its problems as security problems and not political problems that can have political solutions. I think we've done Israel a disservice by selling them so many weapons. But why shouldn't America arm its allies in the Middle East? It's wrong because there have been so many debacles associated with the policy. Iran and Iraq are the two biggest foreign policy disasters since Vietnam. Then there's Turkey, which has become a human rights catastrophe in its treatment of the Kurds, and there's Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are teetering on the brink of their own catastrophes. Then there's Pakistan, where human rights abuses are uncontrolled, and Afghanistan, where the forces we supported against the Russians have returned the country to the 15th century. That, to me, is a failed policy. Washington policy makers would say it was an attempt to achieve various balances of power in the region. The policy was to find moderate pro-Western regimes and basically bribe them with weapons to do our bidding and protect our oil interests in the region. You can say that the policy aimed at a balance of power in the Persian Gulf, or that it aimed at "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran. But it's essentially the same policy: We arm our friends in the region to help us protect our economic interests. And it just keeps backfiring. N E X T+P A G E+| U.S. responsibility for Kurd oppression