The U.S. has the biggest baddest military ever, fuck yeah!

1,200 Billion Dollars to Arm the Planet
By Pierre Haski
Rue89

Monday 11 June 2007

In the face of that, the effort the G-8 agreed on for Africa was 60 billion dollars. A demagogic observation? You decide ...

It's demagogic, but I can't help myself. At the end of last week, the G-8 meeting in Germany promised 60 billion dollars for Africa, a sum presented as a significant effort to bring this continent out of despair. Monday, a report revealed that global military spending had reached 1,200 billion dollars last year, that is, an increase of 3.50 percent over the prior year (and of 37 percent over ten years). Take out your calculator: 3.50 percent of 1,200 billion makes the tidy sum of 42 billion dollars, just for the increase over last year. Something to compare to the G-8 gesture ...

Demagogic, I said, even before the first outraged comments came in ... Obviously, countries not spending this money for their armament, or excessive armament, will not make Africa any better off or assure that the sums thus economized be used wisely. Africa itself, moreover, participates in this spending with several conflicts between the impoverished in Somalia or in the Congo ... Remember the maps that we lined up last week: Africa comes in at the head of continents where people are dying in warfare.

Moreover, when the planet naively believed, after the end of the Cold War, that the arms race was over, development aid did not, all the same, profit. That was the time when we could report from former USSR tank factories converted into frying pan plants ... Today, people present the fact that Vladimir Putin proposed to George W. Bush that he should install his anti-missile shield in Azerbaijan as a great diplomatic breakthrough ...

So let's forget Africa and get back to military spending. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) annual report allows us to follow the ever-instructive curve of military spending. There one may learn, for example, that the United States spent 529 billion dollars on their military operations in 2006, or a five percent increase over the previous year, essentially due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the report, France, China, Japan and Great Britain each represented four to five percent of global military spending in 2006. The United States and Russia were the principal arms vendors from 2002 to 2006, with the share of each representing about 30 percent of global sales. Ultimately, China and India remain the world's main arms importers. Two countries in the midst of full-bore economic booms, certainly, but both with significant shares of their population below the poverty line ...

And to show how far we have come from a disarmament perspective, the report shows that, "The volume of conventional weapons traded internationally in 2006 was 50 percent higher than that of 2002."

But perhaps it's not so demagogic to make the connection between military spending and the fight against poverty. The Stockholm institute itself emphasizes that, "Millions of human beings' lives could be saved by health measures that would cost a tiny fraction of what the world spends every year on its armies."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061307G.shtml

jlew24asu wrote:

hands I'm with ya but i'm just being realistic. borders, land, recourses, will always be at the center of a dispute. do you expect the borders of countries in africa, for example, to stay the same forever? do you think no man will ever want to overthrow a government? look at the amount of dictators in the world. will they all give up power and let freedom reign? its just reality.

lets stick to strictly our country, the good old USA. i cant control the politics of another country or region.

who is a threat to our borders? who would invade us? why would they do that? do you really think we are threatened, with or without our arsenal?


ps...having several thousand nukes pointed at each others civilian centers is not realistic, that is insane.

jlew24asu wrote:

if we had no means of defense, what would stop anyone from invading us? or attacking us?

who would invade us and for what purpose?

mexico? canada?