Critics of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) have lampooned the agreement’s relatively meager reporting requirements and evident lack of an enforcement mechanism. But for all its weaknesses, the treaty deserves to be celebrated. One person dies every minute as a result of armed violence, and the ATT makes significant progress towards combating this problem.
Fearing the disruption of gun exports, the National Rifle Association vociferously opposed the Arms Trade Treaty that was approved on April 2 by the UN General Assembly. The joke, though, is not just on the NRA. While the treaty doesn’t do anything to affect American gun-owners, it’s so weak that it doesn’t seem to affect anybody at all.
Israel has long been stronger militarily than its adversaries. This was actually true as early as Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Since 1967, the United States has helped its ally maintain this edge. Today, thanks to a single significant arms sale, that may no longer be the case. Last December, the United States finalized a roughly $30 billion sale (part of a much larger package) of 84 F-15SA Strike Eagles to Saudi Arabia, along with upgrades to the Kingdom’s 70 existing Strike Eagles to bring them up to a comparable standard.
The bully came to Washington. The American president told him in no uncertain terms that the United States would not support a military attack on Iran at this moment. The bully met with 13,000 of his U.S. supporters in an effort to pressure the White House. It didn’t work. The bully went home empty-handed.
This story of Obama the diplomat standing up to Netanyahu the bully omitss some important information.
In 2010, the U.S. made its largest single arms sale ever: $60 billion worth to Saudi Arabia.
In a rare show of bipartisanship, Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and John Cornyn (R-Tx) jointly introduced legislation demanding that the administration sell F-16s to Taiwan.
The gun lobby response to Oslo was business as usual for them: the victims should have been armed. Better a shoot-out than a massacre!
On May 19, President Barack Obama said that “extraordinary change” is sweeping the Middle East. But the president’s silence about signs of counter-revolution in the Middle East is deeply disturbing. This silence comes not just from the White House but also from the Republican and Democratic leaderships in Congress, and the mass media. There is a particularly deafening silence about the arms deal negotiated with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last year.
The International Defense Exhibition, otherwise known as IDEX, has been held bi-annually in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since 1993. It is the largest defense expo in the Middle East and North Africa and one of the biggest in the world. But far from being a one-off, it highlights the UAE’s growing stature as a global arms buyer.
This week, the words will take center stage. On Thursday, according to administration officials, President Obama will “reset” American policy in the Middle East with a major address offering a comprehensive look at the Arab Spring, “a unified theory about the popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain,” and possibly a new administration approach to the region.