Will Western countries ever stop selling weapons to potential enemies?
It didn’t take long. At the Singapore arms fair two weeks ago European arms manufacturers were boasting that their systems had been “combat-tested” in the gulf war. But this was a war that provided a caricature of the danger of the international arms trade: it was the Soviets and the West who sold Saddam Hussein the weapons which enabled him to build up the world’s fourth biggest fighting force. Will the West ever stop selling weapons to potential foreign enemies?
Arms-control experts insist that we now have a unique chance–perhaps a last chance–to stop the reckless selling of weapons. There is a lesson in the history of the last 20 years in the Middle East. Ever since oil prices quadrupled in 1973, arms sellers have been turning oil into arms, with little sign of any consistent diplomatic objective on the part of the buyers. In the 1970s they equipped the Shah of Iran with the most sophisticated tanks and planes, supposedly to defend him against the Russians; but the shah’s arsenal was then taken over by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who used it against Iraq. Saddam was armed to defend Iraq against Khomeini, and then turned his weapons against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In the meantime the Saudis and Kuwaitis were spending billions of dollars on planes, tanks and high-tech systems which proved almost useless when they faced a real danger. In the words of Adnan Khashoggi, the arms middleman for the Saudis in the ’70s: “The Arabs have learned that it’s no good buying arms if you can’t use them.”
The gulf war has certainly produced some agonized rethinking among arms buyers. The Kuwaitis were humiliated by their defenselessness against the Iraqis. The Saudis made little effective use of their own costly weaponry. Soviet exports also suffered; the Scud missile was a clumsy instrument compared with the pinpoint-accurate Patriot and Tomahawk systems.
It is the effectiveness of computerized missiles that provides both a new danger and a new opportunity for arms control. Nearly every country in the Middle East now wants Patriots or their successors, and the United States is for the time being the only supplier. The French and the British are lagging behind the Americans in most sophisticated weaponry, and the Soviets are still more backward. The old excuse for selling weaponry–that if we don’t, the Russians will–is now less persuasive.
The Americans thus have a clear opportunity, and responsibility, to take a new initiative to control arms sales. There are some hopeful signs. The Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), set up by seven nations in 1987, has already had some effect, particularly in stopping the Condor 2 missile which Iraq was developing with Argentina and Egypt. There is also a new opportunity to restrain competition among manufacturers in NATO countries. If Europe had a more integrated arms industry, there would be less pressure to find markets abroad.
The most effective way to cut back on arms buying is to stop the flow of money financing it. The most startling fact about the arming of Iraq was the willingness of the West to provide not only the finances but also the subterranean channels, including the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, currently under investigation in Washington. And the most worrying development since the gulf war has been the decision of President George Bush to revive export credits for American arms companies, to enable them to compete more effectively with European arms exporters. The president’s motive is clear: “Maintenance of a viable U.S. defense is critical,” as presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater explained it. It is an old justification. But in the past the providers of aid to the developing world, including the World Bank, have been far too little concerned with the linkage with arms. Now at last the World Bank and the IMF are insisting on restrictions on military spending–strongly backed by the former president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. And donor countries, particularly Japan, are watching their clients’ military aspirations more carefully.
Controlling arms sales today is mainly a question of political will. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council–the Russians, Americans, French, Chinese and British–between them sold 87 percent of the weapons bought by developing countries in the late 1980s. Having acted in unison over the gulf war, they should be able to confront the mistakes which helped to cause the war. The United Nations, with its enhanced prestige, should be able to monitor sales more effectively, perhaps with the help of a register of arms sales, as advocated by Norway’s former prime minister Gro Brundtland. The United States’ missile superiority gives it the power to extend and enforce missile-technology control. And the Japanese, who do not export weapons but who supply critical components, could become important participants in new plans for the control and monitoring of arms sales. It will not be easy to withstand national pressure to sell weapons for short-term economic advantage. But if we cannot face up to the danger and the opportunity this time, we may not have another chance.
