Monday, June 15, 1998

No 'farewell to arms' around here

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN - OK, you can take away my cynic-in-good-standing card, and I'll throw in the cheap irony, too: I'm horrified. I'm shocked and appalled, as they say in letters to the editor, to learn we used nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam War. Goggle-eyed, whomper-jawed, the whole nine yards. It's enough to gag a maggot. I guess that was the one we fought to make the world safe for hypocrisy.

Not only had we already signed a treaty banning use of chemical weapons, not only had President Nixon announced a "no first use" policy, but also think of the charming piquance this adds to all the years we have been denouncing Iraq's Saddam Hussein for using poison gas and manufacturing nerve gas. And we apparently went after American defectors with nerve gas, adding yet another layer of hypocrisy to our oft-heard horror about Saddam's use of poison gas against "his own people."

This may be as good a time as any for a tour d'horizon of American hypocrisy about weapons around the world. During the Cold War, we became accustomed to America's getting in bed with what seemed to be every fascist kleptocrat on Earth. We were perennially arming monstrous dictators and backing tyrants who abused and stole from their own people.

All this was justified in the name of the great Realpolitik of stopping communism. Those of us who objected to arming nun-rapers and bishop-killers - who were always described as "freedom fighters" in those days - were patted on the head and told, tut-tut, it was all being done in the name of democracy, and the only dictator we needed to be upset about was Fidel Castro.

Even if we accept that sorry sophistry about the means and the ends, the Cold War has been over for almost nine years now. Some of the old dictators have died of natural causes: Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most remarkable thieves we ever helped keep in power, is gone at last after three decades of raping his country. Suharto of Indonesia has just been ousted, despite the fact that the Pentagon was still training his army right up to the last minute. The shah is long gone, leaving only the bitter consequences of our folly there.

But here we are with our knickers in a twist because India and Pakistan have just "joined the nuclear club" (such a curious euphemism). And who do you think helped get them there? According to a study from the Council for a Livable World that used numbers from the "655 Report" (a congressionally mandated report under Section 655 of the Foreign Assistance Act), in 1996, $165 million worth of licenses to India allowed sales of technical, manufacturing and co-production agreements ($127 million), ship components ($9 million), bomb-guidance kits ($6.6 million) and ammunition-manufacturing equipment ($3.6 million). For Pakistan, same year, of the $4.3 million in weapons we exported there, $2.1 million was for radar equipment. Significant licenses of $83 million granted included $35 million of F-16 spare parts, 10,000 artillery fuses worth $4.1 million, TOW missile spare parts and 100 military trucks.

According to William D. Hartung, during the 1980s, U.S. law required the president to cut off military aid and sales to any nation that was actively pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. But the Reagan administration made an exception to that policy in the case of Pakistan because it was helping run guns to the "freedom fighters" in neighboring Afghanistan. And now we're all concerned that the two countries will go to war.

Ditto Cyprus, where peace talks are unraveling and the United States scrambles to sell jet fighters, tanks and missiles to both Turkey and Greece. Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Central Asia, you name it - if there's a trouble spot in the world, we're busily profiting by selling arms to all sides.

According to Luke Warren of the Council for a Livable World, since the Cold War, the United States has become the world's largest arms dealer, selling, on average, $16.6 billion per year since 1991. And mind you, this trade is supported by taxpayer subsidies; last year, we - the taxpayers of this country - provided $7.8 billion in corporate welfare to arms manufacturers to sell overseas.

The invaluable Hartung, an authority on global arms sales with the World Policy Institute and author of And Weapons for All, points out that our double standard on nuclear proliferation is so apparent that it has undermined our leverage in getting China to clean up its act. Hartung has documented the presence of U.S.-supplied weapons in 39 of the world's 42 ongoing ethnic and territorial conflicts.

Hannah Arendt, who knew how to parse sin, wrote: "As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."

Creators Syndicate, Inc.