By:Kayhan Int’l
The recent ‘reconsideration’ by India’s defence ministry for purchase of the US military industry’s most sophisticated, most expensive and radar/missile evading high altitude $220 million apiece drone, after it was shot down by Iran’s ever-alert defenders for violating Iranian airspace, means a loss of almost 7 billion dollars for the Donald Trump Administration which had already enticed New Delhi to buy 30 such unmanned aircraft.
This was not the lone loss of a lucrative weapons deal involving several billion dollars for America’s ‘beautiful armaments’, as Trump likes to call them and thinks he can use them to exterminate at least ten million Afghan men, women, and children in a few days, in addition to wiping out Afghanistan from the map of the world.
Earlier this year, India had preferred Russian weaponry to US weaponry, much to the chagrin of Trump, who is finding it increasingly difficult to sell American arms.
Turkey, for its part, brushing aside US warnings went ahead with the purchase of Moscow’s highly advanced S-400 air defence system even if it meant Washington won’t be selling the supposedly stealth F-35 aircraft to Istanbul – thereby squandering the chance to earn billions of dollars more for its much-propagandized military hardware.
Even Qatar has shown interest in the S-400, despite hosting thousands of American soldiers at its al-Odeid airbase.
Of course, there are eager buyers of American arms and that too at overinflated prices in the range of several hundred billion dollars. These are the rootless and unrepresentative regimes of the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, which thrives on the looted oil wealth of the deprived indigenous people of the Eastern Region, and which Trump humiliatingly calls a ‘Milk Cow’.
Since ‘cows’ are unable to use state-of-the-art military technology, the US provides them military personnel as well – at a very high rate – for operating these weapons, but to the exasperation of Riyadh, the expensive American aircraft have not only failed to bomb the poor Yemenis into submission, but the Patriot anti-missile batteries are being pierced time and again by the locally assembled ballistic missiles of the innovative Ansarallah defenders.
Events of the past few weeks are a firm proof in this regard. The US supplied anti-missile defence system has utterly failed in stopping the barrage of ballistic missiles and explosive-loaded drones which have turned the southern parts of Saudi Arabia into a no fly zone for the regime in Riyadh, which has been forced to close down three airports including the King Khalid International Airport.
It means, either the US is supplying obsolete weapons to Saudi Arabia in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars, or that American arms are neither ‘beautiful and elegant’ as Trump calls them nor are effective against the armaments produced by other countries.
Experts are divided. Some think Washington does not want Riyadh to possess state-of-the-art military technology that may cause embarrassment to Israel.
Others opine that the US is deliberately delivering defective defence equipment to Saudi Arabia for fear that sooner or later the tottering Wahhabi regime may be a thing of the past and the falling of American weaponry into the hands of the new rulers or emerging independent states, might pose problems for US allies.
Still others think that the American armament industry has lost the cutting edge when compared to weapons being produced by Russia, China, North Korea, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
They point out the debacle of the Takfiris in Syria and Iraq, where after initial success the macabrely murderous terrorists, supplied with the latest lethal weapons including poison gas by the US, Britain, France, and Israel, proved no match for the Iranian trained and armed militias of the two countries.
As a matter of fact, military strategists consider the 33-day war of 2006 in Lebanon where the legendary anti-terrorist movement, the Hezbollah, shattered the myth of the illegal Zionist regime’s military invincibility, as the turning point.
Since then, Israel and the US, in spite of possessing nuclear arsenals, have lost the expertise to compete with other countries in producing quality conventional weapons, and that is the reason Trump does not want a shooting match with Iran because he has been informed by Pentagon experts of the Islamic Republic’s solid defences that will puncture the pride of the CENTCOM terrorists.
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