israel uses the money to buy weapons from u.s. we somehow consider that a win/win situation.....being the dealer of arms to the world...
and certainly to the me
The Pentagon has long tossed weapons systems to the winds, price tags attached, as a way of seeking influence and control over regional military forces. But now US arms corporations see in the Arab states a game-changing instance of what the Lockheed Martin CEO recently called “growth markets,” oil rich nations whose urgent new purchases of bombs, missiles, helicopters, drones, and advanced fighter jets will keep US defense plants humming, even as the American military budget is downsized. In the last year alone, just two countries, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have spent over a hundred billion dollars on arms — which are being rained now on the Shiite enemy in Yemen. Last week, an indignant Washington
deployed a flotilla of warships to protest Iran’s arming of its client in Yemen, as if American-supplied weapons were not already pummeling them.
Most of the weapons being sold by US corporations in the Middle East are for use not, as the mythic Cold War ethic had it, in defense of democratic liberalism, but in anarchic sectarian conflict, and in the shoring up of antidemocratic dictatorships. As the last decade has made plain, the outpouring of American arms does not achieve its goals in any case. Our “growth market” financial windfall might seem like squeezing lemonade out of the lemon we created, but no. Soon enough these American weapons will be turned against Americans again. We won’t be able to say we did not know.
Making weapons of our own destruction - The Boston Globe
