The arms trade is intensifying under Trump

Peter Castagno

The revolving door between public officials and defense contractors has long distorted U.S. foreign policy to serve war profiteers at the expense of the public interest and basic humanitarian norms.

A freelance writer with a Master’s degree in International Conflict Resolution, Peter Castagno, who has traveled throughout West Asia to gain firsthand insight in some of the troubled areas, has written an informative and thought-provoking article in this regard titled “The arms trade is intensifying under Trump.”

From U.S. weaponry ending up in the hands of the terrorist group of Daesh, to supplying arms fueling civil conflict and therefore contributing to the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, the lack of oversight on arms deals has enabled human rights atrocities.

The global arms trade is experiencing its greatest boom since the Cold War, fueled by horrific wars in West Asia and revitalized power rivalries among China, Russia and the United States. In their most recent report, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute revealed a 44 percent increase in arms sales from 2002 to 2017. The United States is the world’s biggest arms exporter by far, holding 34 percent of total market share — a 58 percent lead on Russia, its closest competitor. From 2017 to 2018, U.S. arms sales to foreign governments increased 33 percent, in part due to the Trump administration’s diminished legal restraints on supplying foreign militias.

During an interview with “Fox News Sunday” in December 2016, Trump said, “The people that are making these deals for the government, they should never be allowed to go to work for these companies”. “You, know, they make a deal like that and then a year later, or two years later, or three years later you see them working for these big companies that made the deal.”
Before entering the White House, Trump asserted his belief in a “lifetime restriction” on top defense officials working for private defense contractors after their public service. Two years later, the Project on Government Oversight released a detailed analysis of the defense sector, revealing 645 instances of federal employees working for the 20 largest Pentagon contractors in fiscal year 2016, the latest year with complete data. Of the 645 instances of former public servants transitioning to work for private defense corporations, 90 percent were hired to work as lobbyists, where they seek to influence public policy to benefit their private employers.

After the resignation of General James Mattis, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan filled the post as interim head of the Defense Department. Before joining the Trump administration, Shanahan spent three decades working for Boeing — a blatant conflict of interest for the person responsible for overseeing federal contracts with private defense contractors. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, called Shanahan “a living, breathing product of the military-industrial complex,” and asserted that “this revolving door keeps the national security elite very small, and very wealthy, and increasing its wealth as it goes up the chain.”

One egregious example of that revolving door is Heather Wilson, who has been secretary of the Air Force since 2017. In 2015, Lockheed Martin paid a $4.7 million settlement to the Department of Justice after the revelation it had used taxpayer funds to hire lobbyists for a $2.4 billion contract. One of the lobbyists was former New Mexico Representative Wilson, ranked as one of the “most corrupt members of Congress” by the nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Wilson was later confirmed as Air Force secretary in the Senate by a 76-22 vote.

Mark T. Esper, the secretary of the Army, worked as vice president of government relations for Raytheon before joining the Trump administration in 2017. The Hill recognized Esper as one of Washington’s most powerful corporate lobbyists in 2015 and 2016, where he fought to influence acquisition policy and other areas of defense bills. Esper’s undersecretary, Ryan McCarthy, is a former Lockheed executive.

The Trump administration’s commitment to advancing arms sales is not only apparent in the legion of officials with severe conflicts of interests occupying the cabinet, but also through directives in official arms export policy. The State Department’s updated Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) Policy Implementation Plan was released in November 2018 and detailed loosened restrictions on the sale of drones and other weapons, new financing options for countries who can’t afford U.S. weaponry, and aims to put pressure on diplomats to put arms deals at the forefront of their mission.

Rachel Stohl, an arms trade expert with the Stimson Center, described the updated policy, saying, “If you read between the lines, it could be a green light for the U.S. to sell more with less restraint.”
A glaring example of the arms industry’s influence on State Department policy is demonstrated by a September 20, 2018, report from The Wall Street Journal. According to the report, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was convinced to continue support for the Saudi campaign in Yemen for the sake of a $2 billion arms deal with U.S.-based defense contractor Raytheon. The State Department’s legislative affairs staff, who influenced Pompeo’s decision, is led by Assistant Secretary of State Charles Faulkner, a former Raytheon lobbyist.

Recent developments by the Trump administration have clarified the nature of the relationship between defense contractors and the federal government, but it would be erroneous to place the majority of the blame on him for the greater trend in global arms sales. Under President Barack Obama, arms exports doubled compared to President George W. Bush, reaching more than $200 billion in total approved deals (approved deals don’t represent actualized contracts, as deals can take years to be ordered and completed).

The rapid increase in exports was part of a broader strategy to replace U.S. soldiers with surrogates in allied countries, as well as to placate allies in the occupied lands called ‘Israel’, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — those incensed by the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Despite brokering more arms deals than any administration since World War II, President Obama did enforce holds on arms exports to some countries guilty of human rights abuses, including Bahrain, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. All of these holds were lifted shortly after the Trump administration took power.

The Trump administration’s priorities on arms sales were further demonstrated after the CIA confirmed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s role in ordering the savage execution of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. President Trump resisted calls to punish the Saudi prince on the grounds that punitive action would jeopardize lucrative arms deals with the kingdom. President Trump’s claims vastly overstated the amount of jobs and money to be lost if the U.S. withdrew support for Saudi military adventurism.

Research from Brown University shows domestic investment in education and health care creates more than twice as many jobs as military spending. Trump’s argument that we have to provide Saudi Arabia or the UAE with bombs that land on school buses, hospitals and weddings in order to preserve jobs is unconscionable and demonstrates a warped sense of priorities.

We, the Americans, don’t have to contribute to what a United Nations Children’s Fund official has labeled a “war on children” to maintain what accumulates to a total of less than 0.5 percent of U.S. jobs. We can invest in productive sectors of the economy like renewable energy and create jobs that truly serve our society.

A real debate on the arms trade is nearly absent from public conversation because the industry can only thrive in secrecy and duplicity. Consider former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s final move as a public official, in which he snuck a provision to curtail debate on Saudi support in Yemen into the U.S. farm bill in December.

Fortunately, Ryan’s manipulative tactics would fail to prevent the House from finally passing a resolution to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen on February 13. Trump has indicated the Yemen resolution will be his first veto, as it represents a major check to executive power and a direct rebuke to his arms export-based style of diplomacy.

After Trump pulled out of the internationally- sealed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, the arms manufacturing companies enjoyed an immediate boost to their stock. This is because demand in the arms trade surges alongside geopolitical instability. Heightened volatility encourages higher arms sales, and the dissemination of weapons to despotic regimes increases volatility, creating a vicious cycle further entrenched by a revolving door of defense contractors who influence public policy to benefit private weapons manufacturers.

In his farewell speech, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the U.S. public of this exact predicament, what he called the “military-industrial complex.” President Eisenhower’s warning remains prescient nearly 60 years later, as the failure to regulate the defense sector has led the U.S. to arm its enemies, enable humanitarian crises and desecrate its values. While the historic House resolution to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen is proof we, in the US, can take concrete action to confront the military industrial complex, greater public awareness is needed to transform U.S. foreign policy in a profound manner. Just as President Eisenhower suggested, it is time for an alert and knowledgeable citizenry to challenge the reasoning behind the U.S.’s endless wars and fight for an alleged ‘peaceful future’.

Syria, then and now: Liberated of Western-backed terrorism

By Max Parry

Saudi soft power and the US art elite have joined forces in a troubling alliance for a cultural campaign of disinformation aimed at American art-going audiences, says Max Parry, an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst who contributes to CounterPunch, Global Research, and Dissident Voice, in his article for the OffGuardian site, titled: “Syria, then and now: Liberated of Western-backed terrorism”.

In a surprise turn of events, last month US President Donald Trump made the abrupt unilateral announcement that American troops would begin to withdraw from Syria. The unexpected decision provoked the wrath of the foreign policy establishment and bipartisan war party in Washington which immediately denounced it as a premature, reckless move that would lead to a resurgence of Daesh. As anticipated, the Beltway blob also claimed it was another sign of Trump’s perceived untold allegiance to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

None of the warmongers in Washington would dare admit that the real gains made against Daesh were by the Syrian army with Iran’s vital advisor role and Russian air support, let alone that their own policies were responsible for its manifestation. Sure enough, a so-called suicide bombing in Kurdish-controlled Manbij killed four American personnel just a month later and Daesh, which has a history of taking credit for attacks perpetrated by others, immediately claimed responsibility. It is almost as if the strategic asset themselves did not desire an American pullback— could it be another ‘false flag’ to keep the war machine in Syria going?

The neocons within the administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, contradicted Trump’s statements on the pullout citing the need to what they called ‘protect the Kurds’ before any such removal. The degree of sincerity behind Trump’s decision has drawn a range of speculation — is it a superficial appeasement of his base to whom he made ‘anti-interventionist’ pledges as a candidate, when the US is conducting a bait-and-switch with no plans to really leave Syria? Perhaps Blackwater private contractors will be taking their place. If Trump is genuine, then his decision-making is being circumvented by the Pentagon who Pompeo and Bolton arguably have demonstrated more allegiance to than their Commander-in-Chief, as not a single US soldier has left Syria since Trump stated his intentions. The ‘deep state’ strikes back.

Meanwhile, increasingly difficult to differentiate from the neocons are the so-called ‘humanitarian interventionists’ of the Democratic Party. A recent poll by Politico and the marketing research firm Morning Consult indicates that 30% less Democrats than Republicans favor the removal of US forces from Syria, while just as many are opposed to an end to the nearly two decade occupation of Afghanistan as well. For years, the American people have been sold a bill of goods that the US has been divinely appointed as the world’s policeman. Despite military aggression being its essential feature, such newspeak enables many self-declared progressives to support US interventionism abroad.

The suffering of populations under governments deemed enemies of the United States, usually exaggerated or invented, is the go-to method of persuasion rallying support for such militarism. The liberal opposition to the troop withdrawal is a testament to the power of the Syria propaganda campaign where the lengths the West has gone to invert reality is without precedent. Since the conflict began, mainstream reports of the war have repeated verbatim disinformation from dubious organizations that heavily favor the Syrian rebels, like the MI6-sponsored Syrian Observatory for Human Rights run by a single individual based in the UK.

Even more sickening has been the media’s love affair with the “White Helmets”, a shady organization purported by the yellow press to be neutral first-responders volunteering to save civilians. Anything but impartial, the White Helmets operate exclusively in terrorist-controlled territory, specifically that of Tahrir ash-Sham (formerly an-Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria),while receiving tens of millions of dollars from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Some of its members may even be combatants themselves, splitting time between waging militancy and crisis-acting as humanitarian aid workers. Founded by an ex-British intelligence officer and Blackwater-affiliated mercenary, they dispense staged footage of their activities to the fourth estate for circulation who invariably never bother to ask — what kind of search and rescue group travels everywhere they go with a movie crew ready for use? Disturbingly, the Netflix-produced “documentary” on the White Helmets even received an Academy Award and its members a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Recently, even the Western art sphere has gotten in on the act. Saudi soft power and the US art elite have joined forces in a troubling alliance for a cultural campaign of disinformation aimed at U.S. art-going audiences. From this past October until January 13th, on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York was the exhibition, titled “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart”, featuring the work of three contemporary artists centered on Syria’s ongoing crisis. On the surface, the display championed the plight of the millions of displaced Syrian citizens who fled the conflict to both surrounding countries in the region and the West. Unfortunately, the showcase featured a heavily biased pro-rebel, Russophobic and Iran narrative while the enormous conflict of interest behind the organization and sponsorship of the exposition was undisclosed to visitors.

The exhibit is one of several ventures organized by the Arab Art Education Initiative (AAEI), a huge project in collaboration with some of the wealthiest and most illustrious art institutions in New York City, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Columbia University. The AAEI’s anodyne endeavor is to “connect contemporary Arab culture with diverse audiences across the five boroughs of New York City, bringing together a coalition of artists and institutions to build greater understanding between the United States and the Arab world.”

It may sound innocuous, but unmentioned in the gallery text is the Saudi government’s funding of the AAEI and visitors would have to look elsewhere to learn of the incompatibility between its stated aims and subsidies.

The primary donor to the AAEI is the arts initiative Edge of Arabia and its subsidiary the Misk Institute, an art-centered cultural diplomacy organization founded by none other than the notorious Saudi Heir Apparent Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) himself. The AAEI’s program was organized in 2017 at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, also known as ‘Ithra’, in Dhahran, and was financially developed by its state-owned petroleum and gas enterprise, Aramco, officially the Saudi Arabian Oil Company. The initiative was anticipated to be a success until an inconvenient controversy suddenly stirred, though not by the abysmal human rights record of Saudi Arabia or its ongoing war on Yemen that has killed tens of thousands in the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. No, the establishment and media were unmoved by those atrocities and saved their feigned concern about human rights for Syria.

It was only the untimely torture, killing, and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoqchi of The Washington Post, ordered by MBS himself, at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey which unexpectedly embroiled the absolute monarchy in scandal and brought embarrassment to anyone connected to the dictatorship. In the aftermath of Khashoqchi’s grisly murder, the dozens of political and financial figures who had championed MBS as a ‘reformer’ immediately began to distance themselves from the 33-year-old heir presumptive. Immediately, the museums involved in the AAEI’s program went into damage control mode, stating they would no longer be accepting Saudi funds in the wake of the fallout. However, it is unclear how this is even possible in the case of the Brooklyn Museum, considering Khashoqchi was killed just a week prior to the exhibition debut and the entire coordination of the display was by the AAEI.

The art on view itself is a combination of ceramic artifacts from the Northern Syrian city of Raqqa dating back to the 13th century and modern three-dimensional sculptures depicting the refugee crisis. However, the artistic billing is misleading as the three artists featured are only loosely connected to Syria today— artist Mohamed Hafez was born in Damascus but raised in Saudi Arabia, designer Hassam Kourbaj has not lived in Syria since 1985 and is a UK-based artist, while the third — sculptor Ginane Makki Bacho, is Lebanese. The curators begin by reducing the enormously complex conflict to a single sentence by alleging that a new generation of refugees seeks to escape Syria, after suppression of the so-called pro-democracy protests.

Taking a cue from its House of Saud paymasters, according to the curatorial account it was the Syrian government’s enlarged response alone that transformed protests calling for democratic improvements into a sectarian, violent insurrection led by Takfiris denouncing Alawites and Shi’a Muslims as heretics to be forcibly converted or slaughtered. We are then supposed to believe a conflict where CIA operatives trained Syrian rebels with weapons supplied by the Saudis, Israel, Turkey and the other Persian Gulf monarchies at the cost of billions of dollars per year, is a war for democracy. Consequently, credulous museum visitors would have no idea the destabilization of Syria using extremist auxiliaries was carefully prepared by Pentagon strategists for decades and that most Syrians actually support President Bashar Assad.

More interesting is the inclusion of the exhibit focus on Syria’s ethnic Circassian population, who allegedly discovered the medieval ceramics on display when they arrived in the Levant and present-day Syria following their expulsion from the North Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire after Tsarist Russia’s victory in the Caucasian Wars in 1864. Regrettably, the gallery text disingenuously attempts to draw a historical parallel between Circassians expelled from the Russian Empire in the 19th century to Syrian refugees fleeing the current war: “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart recounts the changing stories of refugees in Syria over time — then and now — and places their differing experiences, a century apart, in a global context. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Syria gave shelter to refugees from Russia — ethnic Circassians, displaced by the Russian conquest of the Caucasus.”

If it isn’t completely obvious, the political implication is that the conflict in Syria is another case of ‘conquest’ by Moscow — or as Joseph Goebbels allegedly said, “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”

The war in Syria has given the West another opportunity to utilize propaganda to vilify Russia, including for the “Circassian question.” Circassian is an umbrella term for the interrelated language and cultures of the Kabardians, Cherkess, Adygs and Shapsug peoples of the North Caucasus region who are predominantly Sunni Muslim. There are actually twelve different Circassian tribes, but during the Soviet era the official designation was reduced to four groups. Many within the diaspora around the world have expressed their desire to eventually return to the region, including the 80–120,000 based in Syria. Some Circassians (or Adyghes) have unofficially labeled their mass deportation by the Russian Empire as a case of ethnic cleansing and even ‘genocide.’

The g-word is a heavily politicized term and for this reason in 2011 the parliament of the US client state of Georgia under the puppet government of Mikheil Saakashvili made the declaration that the Russian Empire was guilty. Circassian nationalists who have advocated its qualification for their forced migration over a century ago have been exploited by anti-Russian neoconservative organizations in the West who represent the interests of oil conglomerates seeking to gain a monopoly on the more than $4 trillion worth in oil beneath the Caspian Sea basin.

In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, former National Security advisor and ex-board member of the Jamestown Foundation, Zbiegniew Brzezinski admitted: “For the US, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia — and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

The primary neocon organization tasked with destabilizing the Caucasus is the Jamestown Foundation, an NGO co-created by former CIA director William Casey in 1984 during the Reagan administration. Its original stated purpose was to assist defectors after high-ranking Soviet diplomats had turned traitor. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, like all outdated Cold War organizations it had to reinvent itself, though its objective remains the same — to undermine what anti-communist hardliners once labeled ‘captive nations’ behind the Iron Curtain. Most of the former Soviet republics were granted their independence, but one exception was the North Caucasus which remained within the Russian Federation to the dissatisfaction of the West which seeks a complete balkanization of post-Soviet Eurasia.

Jamestown and other right-wing NGOs like the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya have spent the last thirty years stirring-up Wahhabist-oriented ethnic separatism in the region, which produced two wars in the Chechen Republic that only officially ended after the ascension of Vladimir Putin. Jamestown is the owner of several Eurasia-oriented publications such as Caucasian Knotwhich peddles anti-Russian propaganda to instigate secessionist turmoil.

Vladimir Lenin reputably once called the Russian Empire ‘a prison house of nationalities’. In the Soviet Union, to address the ‘national question’ the second chamber of the legislative body guaranteed representation for all of the different ethnic groups in the federation, including the more than 50 residing in the Caucasus. Those with social vestiges and low literacy rates like the Circassians were even provided preferential treatment by the People’s Commissariat for Education. Since the reinstatement of the free market in Eastern Europe, the US has fomented separatist and nationalist causes across Eurasia and attempted to undo the progress made during the Soviet era. The neocon effort to exploit the Circassian issue is a pretext for advocating their repatriation to the region and use of them as a geopolitical chess piece.

This culminated in protests by Circassian nationalists against the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi on the basis that the games would be taking place on top of the graves of their ancestors during the 150th anniversary of their exiling. Few would doubt the brutality of the Tsarist absolute monarchy, which was just one of the many reasons it was overthrown in the Russian Revolution. However, whether or not what happened over a century and a half ago to the Circassians, a nationality so culturally backwards their marriage practice consists of bride kidnapping, was genocide, is irrelevant. Their deceitfulness could not be more obvious and the West has a long history of mobilizing the grievances of ethnic groups for its own political gain against Moscow.

To give it perspective, the US interference in the Caucasus is akin to Moscow advocating separatism for the dozens of federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States, as well as independence for territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands. Nonetheless, the dangerous ideological myth of American exceptionalism permits the US to support factionalism in Russia and other countries around the world to the detriment of international peace. The US is already experiencing blowback from this interference with the Boston Marathon bombings, as suspected Chechen perpetrator Tamerlan Tsarnaev was reportedly radicalized at a Jamestown-sponsored program while traveling abroad in Georgia.

The Russian assistance was at the request of the Syrian government and unlike the American foray was not in violation of international law. Moscow’s participation turned the war back in Assad’s favor, from the liberation of Aleppo from an-Nusra to the defeat of Daesh in Palmyra and Deir ez-Zor. The close proximity of Russia to West Asia coupled with the history of terrorism exported to the Caucasus by the Saudis made Russian involvement in Syria an obligation in order to prevent a resurgence of Wahhabi-led breakaway violence in its southern border region. What is indisputable is that today Syria’s many religious minority groups, including Circassians who generally support Assad, are back under the protection of a government that is tolerant of all sects. It surely would have ended up just like Libya as a lawless failed state overrun by salafists if Moscow hadn’t interceded, and the oil-rich Caucasus once again in danger of being fragmented.

Perhaps no issue has been more divisive in recent years than the war in Syria. The propaganda barrage has misled many into forgetting that we are still living in the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism, where to generate profits wealthier nations are driven to conquer others on a global scale in order to have dominion over their markets and subjugate the labor power within them.

In this context, the national question takes center stage and so does defending the right of individual nations to self-determination. While no one can deny the extremism of the rebels at this point, instead of supporting Syria itself some have naively chosen to throw their support behind Kurdish nationalist militias in Northern Syria that have established an ‘autonomous federation’ based on a self-proclaimed ‘libertarian socialist direct-democracy’ style of government that it somehow reconciles with its participation in the US-created Syrian Democratic Forces and permitting the occupation of nearly a dozen American military facilities in its territory.

It is clear that the Kurds are being used as pawns to establish a Kosovo-like protectorate bound to US interests in balkanizing Syria, and Rojava supporters on the Western left are suffering from what Lenin called an infantile disorder.

The establishments collaborating with the medieval Saudi regime in its artistic scheme are disguising their lucrative motivations as building bridges between civilizations. In the case of the Brooklyn Museum, a simulated concern for refugees which is liberal politics at its worst. The art world has long been tainted by the power structures it is situated in and the museums involved have allowed their space to be occupied by war propagandists in exchange for blood money from the military-industrial complex and a totalitarian Wahhabi cultist regime.