Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truth-out.org/instead-bombing-dictators-stop-selling-them-bombs68680

When all you have is bombs, everything starts to look like a target. And so, after years of providing Libya's dictator with the weapons he's been using against his people, all the international community - France, Britain and the United States - has to offer the people of Libya is more bombs, this time dropped from the sky rather than delivered in a box to Muammar Qaddafi's palace.

If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it's that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate - and that democracy doesn't come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.

President Barack Obama announced his latest peace-through-bombs initiative last week - joining ongoing US conflicts and proxy wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia - by declaring he could not "stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy and ... where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government."

Within 24 hours of the announcement, more than 110 US Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired into Libya, including the capital Tripoli, reportedly killing dozens of innocent civilians - as missiles, even the "smart" kind, are wont to do. According to The New York Times, allied warplanes with "brutal efficiency" bombed "tanks, missile launches and civilian cars, leaving a smoldering trail of wreckage that stretched for miles."

More at the link --

[aquart]

1. Very funny.

Touchingly innocent, but still funny.

[kickysnana]

10. -1

[Freddie Stubbs]

2. Then the dictators will just buy them from China and Russia

[aquart]

4. Hey, Israel makes very good arms.

Sold a bunch of drones for Turkey to kill Kurds with while Turkey was screeching about the flotilla.

Lotta competition in the arms market.

[frylock]

9. really?

[robcon]

3. The OP is a little simplistic.

If someone wants to buy bombs, they will get the bombs. Money is all you need to get weapons, whether from the west, from North Korea, from Russia or from non-government parties.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

6. The vast majority of Libyan weapons were Russian/Soviet in origin

[nosmokes]

7. The truth isn't very complicated.

And the fact that arms can be obtained elsewhere doesn't mitigate the fact that we supplied the lion's share of what was used against the civilian population in Libya and what comes back to bite us in the ass every where else we fight a war by proxy.

[Igel]

11. You don't actually know that.

For decades, Libya got materiel from the USSR and allied states; later, from North Korea and former Soviet client states.

The sources for the article seem accurate. The article skews them. It confuses "approval" with "delivery"--there can be years between the two, and often there are years between the two. It confuses the scuttled $77 million dollar deal selling armaments to Libya--troop carriers--with an actual deal. In real terms, the deals with the US are small, mostly because once you have a military equipped with Soviet-standard equipment it's really hard to immediately integrate much hardware.

I'll let slide that most of the dollar amounts were *European* and not *American.* It's hard to keep the two separate sometimes.

Nonetheless, if you have Grad launchers? US-made artillery won't fit. And some of the reports indicate that in Benghazi Grad shells were used. Whether they were from the USSR, Russia, Central Europe, Iran, Turkey, North Korea, or someplace else doesn't much matter; the US doesn't make them, nor does Western Europe.

In fact, most of the reports that actually name weaponry don't name anything made in the US or Western Europe. Doesn't mean that the "lion's share" wasn't made by the US. It just means this article says pretty much zip about it.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

12. Unfortunately, it is not the truth

Libya was a Soviet client for many years and it makes up the vast majority of its equipment

[Warpy]

5. It's the one thing we manufacture here that people want to import

I'm being serious about this. Besides, there's too much "If we don't sell them, China (Israel, India, Russia) will, so what's the big deal?

Still you'd think that would be the beginning of good sense in foreign policy, wouldn't you?

Something I've never accused this country of is good sense in foreign policy.

[nashville_brook]

8. As the bombing started in Libya, Obama was in Brazil hawking F-18s

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/20/us-obama-brazil-jet-idUSTRE72J4GK20110320