April 4, 2003	Friday	Safar 1, 1424

UNITED NATIONS: When the dust finally settles on post-war Iraq, the United States may have unleashed virtually all of its state-of-the-art weaponry on a country already devastated by 13 years of rigid UN sanctions.

After 14 days of heavy pounding, US military forces so far have dropped over 8,700 bombs, including more than 3,000 missiles, and also fired millions of rounds of ammunition on military and civilian targets inside the country.

When US fighter pilots in B-2 stealth bombers launched the initial attack on a residential compound in Baghdad — believed to be a meeting place for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and senior Baath Party officials — the opening salvo included a pair of 2,000 pound bombs and 36 deadly long-range Tomahawk missiles. The US military will have to replace all of these weapons — worth billions of dollars — giving a tremendous boost to the US military industry, which has been on the skids since the last Gulf War in 1991.

In the latest ‘Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations’, the US State Department predicts that US arms sales are expected to reach over $14 billion this year, the largest total in almost two decades, compared to $12.5 billion in 2002.

“A tragic indicator of the values of our civilization is that there’s no business like war business,” says Douglas Mattern of the New York-based War and Peace Foundation.

One writer describes a “charmed circle of American capitalism”, where Tomahawk and cruise missiles will destroy Iraq, Bechtel Corporation (which once employed US Vice President Dick Cheney) will rebuild the country. And stolen Iraqi oil will pay for it.”

“US weapons contractors are likely to gain significant profits because of this war,” says Natalie Goldring, executive director of the Programme on Global Security and Disarmament at the University of Maryland.

Global annual military spending was $780 billion in 1999, $840 billion in 2001 and is on target for one trillion dollars, according to UN estimates.

Besides the human casualties, the 14-day-old Iraqi war has seen the destruction of millions of dollars worth of military equipment on both sides of the battlefield.

A US Apache Longbow helicopter, brought down by Iraqi farmers, costs about $22 million. The US Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, which is also on the casualty list, is priced at over $1.2 million. The war has also seen the destruction for the first time on a battlefield of a monstrous US-built Abrams battle tank.

Goldring pointed out that Washington has armed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan for decades. “The strategy was to give and sell these countries weapons so that they could defend themselves, and we wouldn’t have to deploy US forces to the region. This strategy has clearly failed,” she added.

Of the world’s 10 major buyers of US weapons systems last year, five were from the Middle East: Egypt ($1.1 billion in US arms), Kuwait ($1.0 billion), Saudi Arabia ($885 million), Oman ($826 million) and Israel ($710 million). The other five nations in the top 10 were South Korea, Japan, Canada, Greece and Britain.

The really big money for US defence contractors, says Mattern, is in the annual Pentagon budget, which has risen from $294 billion in 2000 to about $400 billion in 2003. At the current rate of growth, the budget is expected to hit $500 billion by 2010.

He said the Pentagon will spend about $60 billion to buy new arms this year and over $30 billion in research and development of new weapons.

“I am not a military expert,” says ‘New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman, “but I can do the numbers: the most recent US military budget was $400 billion, while Iraq spent only $1.4 billion dollars.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.