Report: U.S. Weapons at War, June 2005 - World Policy Institute

Report: U.S. Weapons at War, June 2005 - World Policy Institute - Research Project: "A new report by the New York-based World Policy Institute finds that a majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world go to regimes defined as undemocratic by our own State Department. Furthermore, U.S.-supplied arms are involved in a majority of the world�s active conflicts.

'Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe,' notes report co-author William D. Hartung. 'Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments.'

'Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush�s pledge to �end tyranny in our world� than the United States� role as the world�s leading arms exporting nation, ' said Frida Berrigan, the report�s co-author. 'Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition partners, these alleged benefits often come at a high price.'

As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan while pledging comparable high tech military hardware to its rival India, U.S. arms sometimes go to both sides in long brewing conflicts. And the tens of millions of U.S. arms transfers to Uzbekistan exemplify the negative consequences of arming repressive regimes."