Merchants of Death. War Profiteers. Death Dealers. These are the people who fan the flames of war to transmute human suffering into profit. They play one nation against another to sell to both sides. Although the international community condemned these actors as conspirers in the tensions leading up to WWI, no policy effectively curbed their influence. In fact, such is the clout of wealth and power accumulated through arms deals that these merchants of death now litter the administrations of our governments’ institutions. Their presence is felt in the profligate overspending that results in $10,000 toilet seats for military cargo planes, it is seen in the constant rebuke of humanitarian law, and it is revealed through the habits of our politicians who espouse ideals of democracy and freedom while pedaling billions of dollars of weapons into regions rife with human rights abuse and violent conflict.
As our world clings ever more desperately to life, it seems our leaders can think of nothing but death.
Subscribe now on: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Spotify | RSS | or search "Ashes Ashes" on your favorite podcast app.
(This is a temporary, automated transcription. We'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Alexey for this great transcript!
[0:00] This is part 2. David, we mentioned how merchants of death and just the international community of arms dealers generally benefit from pitting countries against each other. And at no time was this happening more aggressively than during the Cold War. And I want to revisit this tidbit of history briefly because I think it's important. The United States was in an arms race with the Soviet Union, you know, capitalism vs. state communism, and once the Soviet Union collapsed you’d think that the great arms race would have ended, right? Well, think again, David, because...
[0:38] Don't put words in my mouth, Daniel.
[0:40] So, because after the end of the Cold War this arms race didn't stop and I think this reveals something very strange which is: we are in effect in an arms race with ourselves. And I'm saying we as the Americans. And this is a really counterintuitive idea, right? How can you be in an arms race with your own self? But I want to start by visiting George Bush's March 1990 White House report titled “National Security Strategy of the United States”. This is George H.W. Bush, of course.
[1:13] From a section dealing with “The Middle East and South Asia”, the report says: “The free world’s reliance on energy supplies from this pivotal region and our strong ties with many of the region's countries continue to constitute important interest of the United States. The Middle East is a vivid example, however, of a region which, even as East-West tensions diminish, American strategic concerns remain. Threats to our interests – including the free flow of oil come from a variety of sources.” And now I want to jump to a section that deals with Africa where the president writes: “ Institution-building, economic development and regional peace are the goals of our policy in Africa. Africa is a major contributor to the world supply of raw materials and minerals and a region of enormous human potential. In the economic dimension, the United States will continue to Advocate reforms that eliminate wasteful and unproductive state-owned enterprises and that liberate the productive private sector and individual initiative.” Or to put it in other words, as Christopher Lane and Benjamin Schwartz write in a 1993 article for foreign policy titled “American Hegemony: Without an Enemy.”
[2:35] Damn, that's fire.
[2:37] Without an enemy?
[2:38] American hegemony: without an enemy – that's fucking fire, I'd listen to that.
[2:42] “The USSR's demise has also forced the American foreign policy elite to be more candid in articulating the assumptions of American strategy. Underpinning U.S. world order strategy is the belief that America must maintain what is, in essence, a military protectorate in economically critical regions to ensure that America's vital trade and financial relations will not be disrupted by political upheaval." So, much of our military presence around the world serves the function of keeping the free flow of materials and goods constant while preventing political system in those regions from interfering with those flows. Which is why George Bush emphasized in 1990 the need to “liberate” African resources from state-owned institutions so that there can be no political barriers to our taking of those resources. The last thing you want if you're the American Empire dependent on some material flow of lumber or other goods from some small African nation is for that African nation to decide democratically that: oh, you know, we the people wish to own our own forest or we the people wish to own our mines, we don't want some foreign country to take the minerals that are beneath our feet – that's the last thing we want. So, basically what the White House is saying is that we require a large military presence in these regions to ensure that that does not happen. And of course, that requires constant defense exports.
[4:20] Which is why around this time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US became the world's largest exporter of arms to developing countries. Here’s from a 1992 Associated Press article.
[4:33] “Since 1989 US arms exports to developing countries have increased by 138%. In 1990 increased US exports and the disintegration of the Soviet Union combined to make the United States the world's largest exporter of weapons to the developing world for the first time since 1984.”
And so, remember, during the Cold War the argument was that we needed to stockpile weapons and export them around the world so that we can protect ourselves from the growing influence of the Soviet Union, the Red Scare, right? And the idea was: we need to export weapons to these countries that are at risk of being influenced by Russian propaganda. So we need to empower them with military might. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when America was placed dominantly at the head of the world power, we continue to export weapons around the world and at an increasing pace. And the question is why? Because as George Bush outlines in that report, the Kremlin no longer posed any threats to our economic interest in the Middle East and Africa, so why are we arming them? Who are we arming them against?
[5:49] Well, here's from George Bush's report once again, “the growing technological sophistication of third world conflicts will place serious demand on our forces. They must be able to respond quickly and appropriately as the application of even small amounts of power early in a crisis usually pay significant dividends.” So he's writing that there is a growing threat in the third world which is that they are experiencing an increasing military sophistication. Why is that the case? Who is supplying them that military technology? Who was giving them the weapons that are a threat to our power? Well, who's the number one exporter of weapons to the third world or the developing countries? It's us. We are, we have been, in effect, in an arms race with ourselves. I want to quote from Chomsky explaining this process in plain language in talks he gave in the mid-90s.
[6:53] “For the preceding 50 years, our problems have always been laid at the Kremlin's door. But now that the Kremlin’s gone, we had might as well tell the truth about it. Because we still need the same policies. And, in fact, just to make sure that there always is a real danger, we also have to sell all these third-world powers high-tech weaponry. The US, in fact, very quickly became the biggest arms dealer to the third world after the Cold War ended. And the arms contractors, of course, know it. If you read Lockheed Martin corporate propaganda, they say: look, we've got to build the F-22 because we're selling advanced upgraded F-16 to these third-world regimes and we're selling them all kinds of complicated air defense systems and who knows, they're just a bunch of dictators, maybe they'll turn against us, so we've got to build the F-22 to defend ourselves from all the high-tech weapons we're selling them.” And how is this any different from Basil Zaharoff selling submarines to both sides of a conflict in the late 1800s. The type of wheeling and dealing that escalated tensions that led to the Great War that killed over 16 million people.
[8:09] I really love that Chomsky quote there, Daniel, specifically the idea that we keep selling advanced weaponry to these developing countries, to these despotic governments that we said that we're not going to sell them to in the first place. But, you know, money is money. And so, we sell to them and then we say: oh, you know, we sold these advanced products that could be dangerous to our soldiers should this despotic whatever turn against us, we need to invest in our own military in order to make us so secure against these things that we've already sold to other people – we need more money, please. And then we would develop F-22, then we’d develop F-35, then we start developing the 6th generation stealth fighter right now even though it won't be ready for three or four decades.
[8:54] That kind of circular reasoning really defines the arms industry. And something that is not new like you've mentioned earlier as we’ve discussed with the lead up to World War I and Basil Saharoff.
[9:06] Where, yeah, I’m going to sell one enemy this submarine, I'm going to sell their mortal enemy two submarines. Now I’m going to go back and say: hey, you know, the Ottoman Empire has two submarines, couldn’t you use one of your own? Couldn’t you use maybe another one, maybe three, how about an anti-submarine missile? You could do that. And then back and forth. And you keep escalating things up and we're doing that in our own military: selling things to developing nations, to nations that could be considered threats and then spinning around and then coming back to us. And, ultimately, sometimes this can also just spiral out of control where we think we have more control over a nation than we do and we end up threatening the stability of larger political regions. And there's an example of that right now that I want to talk about just briefly. And that's what's happening in Turkey, to go back sort of, Daniel, to the Ottoman Empire. And like I said these stories are very cyclical. And so, in Turkey right now, Turkey who is a NATO member, who has numerous civil rights violations, that is actively committing what may or may not be a genocide in Northern Syria in Rojava region, specifically in the Afrin province, where they've been funding a jihadist death squads that have been displacing and murdering people who aren't of the same ethnicity or religion as the soldiers or mercenaries. Previously they've been directly buying oil from ISIS making sure that they were sending weapons and funds to ISIS.
[10:36] It's an open secret in this region of the world that Turkey is trying to fund this. The whole region is a mess. I don't want to get this into a Syrian Civil War conversation because it's complicated, it’s long, it makes a lot of people angry and there's no point to it. So, to go back to modern-day Turkey, Turkey is considered a strategic partner in the F-35 development program which means they have full knowledge share and they also create some of the pieces that are considered essential to the manufacturing and ultimately the completion of the F-35 aircraft end project.
[11:07] But Turkey sits in an interesting place, sort of in between Western Europe and Russia. And Russia has been trying to court Turkey for a while, the same way the United States has been trying to court Turkey. Because Turkey is such an interesting geographical regional power, the way that they sort of span these areas, that they block certain bodies of water, they're important to the United States missile shield program for NATO, for Eastern Europe and for their larger ballistic missile shield program around the world.
[11:37] Consequently, also Russia would court Turkey for their own purposes geopolitically as well as another source for selling their arms. So, the US has been cooperating with Turkey for this F-35 program but recently Turkey put out a procurement order saying we would like to buy some anti-air defense missiles that also have the capability of downing other missiles and ballistic missiles as well. There's really only two major systems in the world right now that can fulfill this need: there's an American system called THAAD, the latest one is pretty up-to-date, it's pretty honestly it's a great system; but Russia has another system of their own called the S-400 which is probably technologically superior to the American system and much, much, much cheaper: you can buy about 6 units of this Russian system for each one of the American systems. It's a no-brainer: on paper, everybody wants these S-400 missile programs, nobody wants American THAADs unless you're forced to buy them because of your treaty obligations.
[12:36] So, Turkey put out this procurement and then ultimately decided they were going to go forward by purchasing this Russian missile system instead of the American one. Meaning that the American manufacturers of these missiles are missing out on billions of dollars of a potential arms deal. This pissed off the United States and they're now threatening to take away the F-35 program from Turkey which, of course, puts the entire F-35 program at risk and makes certain partners in this program more worried about their involvement, because Turkey was considered to be such an integral part of it that they could never be kicked out of it like this. But as we’ve talked about throughout this episode, the US just doesn't care about treaties, obligations or any sort of contracts when it comes to forwarding their own arms ideals.
[13:18] And so now we're seeing sort of standoff. And it looks like actually, Turkey is going to come out the winner of this: they going to get this Russian S-400 system shipped in, installed, their soldiers are going to be trained up on it, they're going to get a much better deal for a superior piece of equipment. And they're still probably going to retain access to F-35s they've already ordered. So, Turkey has already purchased four finished F-35 aircraft but they have not been delivered yet. And the Pentagon is threatening that if they go forward with this S-400 purchase that they will not receive those aircraft at all, despite already having paid for them, and they will not be able to afford any more of these going forward. They’ve issued this ultimatum, they have till July 31st in order to make their decision. But it really does look like Turkey is going to try and have the best of both worlds. And definitely take the S-400 system over the American one. So, I mean this is like a very interesting specific example of the way that somebody's arms deals can play out when there's competing geopolitical interest between two major arms exporters: United States and Russia in this case. But the larger thing I think that is interesting here is the idea that the United States and Russia are both willing to destabilize a region that they both have significant geopolitical interests in order to further their arms exports. And that's this concept that has been continuing over and over and over.
[14:37] Ultimately, if the United States or Russia ends up losing out on this, it doesn’t matter. And they continue to pour arms into other parts of this region. So the United States has been providing Israel with many of its F-35 jets, they've been flying active sortie missions down there. Russia's been providing Syria with its S-300, one generation before this current S-400 system, and has S-400 defending their own Russian installations within Syria, Iran plays into all of this. They're willing to pump more and more and more weapons into this area that has seen conflict for years at this point. That looks like it's being an escalation of conflict with what's going on between the United States and Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia right now, with the three Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US trying to incite some sort of conflict against Iran. We're willing to arm this up even more, to add more gunpowder to this powder keg already that's bursting at the seams. And it's all to serve these larger contracts that as we've established throughout this show, in the previous episode, don't really economically benefit these countries when we really get down to the math and do serve to make not only these nations more unsafe: the United States, Russia, whatever – they all are going to come out worse from the ultimate result of this deal either way, but also put at risk the lives of millions of civilians in this region who are now having to suffer under the increased tensions and the fact that there are just that many more weapons out there ready to kill them at a moment's notice.
[16:04] But that's the reality of the way that these arms deals play out.
[16:08] Two ideas I would love to close out with are opportunity cost and national security. In terms of opportunity cost, from Andrew Feinstein's book The Shadow World, he writes: “In addition to the primary moral issue of the destruction caused by their products, there is the related concern of the 'opportunity cost' of the arms business. For while a weapons capability is clearly required in our unstable and aggressive world, the scale of defense spending in countries both under threat and peaceable results in the massive diversion of resources from crucial social and development needs, which in itself feeds instability."
And an example he provides is how South Africa was led to purchase some $7.5 billion worth of war equipment, earning several hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions for arms dealers, at a time when 6 million South Africans with HIV desperately needed medicine the government could not afford. Think back to that $2,100 per capita figure we quoted at the beginning of part one that comes directly out of the pockets of US citizens. Are there domestic issues that we face like crippling debt, medical bankruptcy, infrastructure collapse and more that might be better served than the spending we do for bombs?
[17:33] And, of course, like he mentions this opportunity cost is a form of instability, right? The less able a region or nation is to provide basic services for its people, the more our people are dying because they can't access affordable insulin: they have to ration these things just to get by and ending up dying as a result of it – the more of these types of things happen, the more instability we will face and the more likely violence becomes. And, of course, like we mentioned the arms build-up itself opens the door for black markets and these merchants of death who encourage and then profit off of perpetual war. But in a more direct way, the proliferation of arms and these deals that our countries do is itself in an erosion of national security for the very countries doing this selling. And this occurs in quite alarming ways, for example: if you think about perpetual enemies of the United States, there are two names that come immediately to mind, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. And these are networks that the US military has opposed for so long but these were formed as a direct result of the weapons that Americans sold to the mujahideen in Afghanistan. And this was part of an operation by the CIA codenamed Operation Cyclone, this was the most costly and lengthy secret CIA operation ever undertaken by the US.
[19:09] And what this operation was: it was the direct arming and financing of the most militant Islamist groups we could find in Afghanistan, specifically this being the mujahideen. And this occurred between 1979 and 1989. And towards the latter part of this operation, okay, the United States was giving the mujahideen $630 million per year in weapons and other financing. Now, why are we doing this? And by the way, we did not stop this after 1989, it just wasn't secret anymore. But the question is why are we doing this? All of this was an attempt to get back at Russia or somehow negatively influence Russia's dominance in the East. And basically what we did is we looked at them and said: how could we get Russia to enter into a military conflict, a quagmire so to speak, just like we the Americans got into in Vietnam that drained our resources, how can we cause Russia to do the same thing, make the same mistake so that they will have to redirect resources and this will in a roundabout way cause a decline of their influence?
[20:28] I think there's two things we should take away from this story: one, we should all be disgusted at the way our governments essentially play games with people's lives. Our governments say: oh, you know if we arm these militant rebels and fuel them to fight a civil war, it will encourage one of our economic rivals to divert resources giving us an edge somewhere else. Did anyone in this strategic planning process ever consider that these machinations would result in the countless deaths of innocent people? I think it's particularly telling that we wanted Russia to make the same mistake we made in Vietnam because it's clear our leaders only considered our mistake in terms of its economic and logistical toll.
[21:13] But just consider the human suffering: we dropped 7 million tons of bombs and chemical weapons in Vietnam, at least 1 million Vietnamese were killed directly from this, and many, many more have died as a result of either exposure to the chemicals we left behind or from starvation since part of our war strategy was to collapse their agricultural foundation.
[21:38] That's our legacy in Vietnam. And our leader said: hey, let's get Russia to make the same mistake in Afghanistan! And the second thing we should take away from this is: for anyone who still holding on to the idea that despite all the suffering our government still acts in a way that is patriotic and in service of its own people, consider once again that those games they were playing directly undermined our own national security. The mujahideen were the violent forces that US troops fought so hard to suppress in Iraq in the early 2000s, they were the main aggressor in the Battle of Ramadi in 2006. Those weapons were paid for by US taxpayers and they ultimately were used to kill American citizens.
[22:28] If we really care about national security, if we really care about human rights abuse around the world, then we would stop this flow of weapons. We would condemn the international arms dealers making billions of dollars off these deals and we would dismantle this violent, this gross and this evil system. And we would not even be worse off economically: sounds like a win-win to me, David.
[22:56] And to me, Daniel. You can find more information about these episodes as well as a full transcript on our website at ashesashes. org.
[23:05] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible and we will never use ads to support this show. So if you like it and would like us to keep going - you, our listener can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend or supporting us on our Patreon page at patreon.com/ashesashescast. We want to thank our two associate producers, John Fitzgerald and Chad Peterson. Thank you so much for your support and also thank you to all of you who have supported us through Patreon with your $3 or $7 or $1. It really adds up and it really helps. In fact, we were recently able to purchase a new piece of sound equipment which is going to make recording these episodes so much easier. Not only will it allow us to process and master the sounds in real-time, it enables us to do backup recordings, it’ll make it easier to schedule interviews. And if I ever stop procrastinating, I'll make a video to demonstrate all this new capability to you all. But your contributions are adding up and it's directly enabling us to give you a better show. At least we hope so. So, if you don't support us on Patreon and would like to, visit that page and sign up, get on the bandwagon: you might even get a sticker.
[24:22] We've been saving up the majority of our donations in order to purchase a used destroyer from the US Navy and become pirates. So, we're going to try and make this as doable as possible. So, if you want to kick in a little bit extra this month, please do. And you can get a cool pirate crew position whenever we finally make that purchase.
[24:43] Yep and that is first come first serve. So, again, hop on the bandwagon if you want to be one of the early crew of that endeavor.
[24:51] We have lots of cool ways of contacting us but one of the coolest is by far our voicemail phone number which is 31399-ashes, that's 313-992-7437. Just give it a call and leave a message and we'll eventually integrate that into an awesome call-in show. We're really excited so call-in now, leave us something cool and we’ll comment on it, reply to you and do something fun with it. I'm excited. We are also on all your favorite social media networks at ashesashescast so be sure to check those out as well. And join our awesome Discord: the community is growing every day, we really love everyone on there, so shout out to all of you. You can find the link to that on our website: click the Community link at the top and then find the invite link to Discord right there.
[25:39] You can also reach us by email, it’s contact at ashesashes .org. Send us your thoughts, we read them and we appreciate them.
[25:47] Next week we’ve got another great episode and we hope you'll tune in for that. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.
[25:58] Quote. (Doing Noam Chomsky impression) “For the preceding fifty years, our problems had always been ‘laid at the Kremlin’s door,’ but now that the Kremlin’s gone, we’d might as well tell the truth about it.”
[26:10] End quote. And how is this..?
(BOTH LAUGH)
[26:15] That's pretty good.
[26:17] Thank you.