War in general: three interesting perspectives (not that anything is more interesting than Thucydides, and he was thousands of years ago)

1. Wars Ultimately Measure Tolerance of Pain -- by Shankar Vedantam/Washington Post

Here's a question with three different answers. The first answer is derived from arithmetic. The second comes from common sense. The third is based on psychology.

Let's say you and I are generals of opposing armies. You have 10 divisions and I have four. If your troops are as good as mine, when would our hypothetical war end? The simplest answer is that the war will be over once four divisions of yours neutralize my four divisions; you have six divisions left, so you win.

The second answer, which is better than the first, is that the war should be over before it begins, because we both know what the outcome would be. If we agree on the outcome without fighting the war, neither of us would have to lose four divisions.

It's the third answer that has particular relevance to real life as the United States finds itself enmeshed in a struggle in Iraq that has already claimed the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. troops. Before we get to it, however, we need to unpack the implications of the second answer.

Given that the opposing sides in wars are often mismatched -- the United States and Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army, for example -- the question that bothers many political scientists is why wars occur at all. War imposes nonrefundable costs -- four divisions each in our hypothetical example -- on both the winner and the loser. If the weaker side is going to surrender anyway, doesn't it makes sense to cry uncle before the war starts? And shouldn't the stronger side be willing to accept a little less than total surrender if it can get most of what it wants without the loss of blood?

"The puzzle is if both sides knew what the outcome of the war would be, then both sides would be better off not fighting the war," said Dan Reiter, a political scientist at Emory University. A good analogy would be a conflict between labor and management at a company. Both sides pay a steep price in the event of a strike. If the outcome of the strike is predictable -- management raises salaries by 10 percent, say -- then both sides gain if they can agree on that goal, or even a more modest goal, without a strike.

What this model suggests is that wars are not primarily about conflicts between two sides, because most conflicts can be settled to the benefit of both sides without actual fighting. War, Reiter and others argue, primarily reflects a lack of information: When two sides cannot agree on how much damage they can inflict on one another -- and how much damage they can sustain -- war offers a mechanism to provide that information. (One implication of this idea is that you could help prevent or end wars by disseminating better information about how strong each side is, and how far each is willing to go.)

"If both sides think they are going to win, they will not be able to reach a bargain," Reiter said. "You fight wars to find out who is stronger and who is willing to take more punishment. When enough information has been provided, the war ends."

Let's apply Reiter's reasoning to the war in Iraq, which will then provide us with the third answer to our hypothetical question. Everyone knows that the U.S. military is the strongest player in the conflict. Nearly four years into a war that has morphed into a complicated struggle with insurgents, what information remains to be provided? The missing information is not about each side's ability to inflict damage, but the other component that Reiter described-- the ability of each side to withstand losses.

The third answer to when the hypothetical war will end is this: It depends. You have an advantage of six divisions, and if we were both willing to fight to the last man, you would win. But no one is ever really willing to fight to the very last man. What if you were really willing to lose only one division, while I was willing to lose three out of my four? Even though you outnumber me by more than two to one, I would win. In fact, I would win even if your troops were nearly three times as good as mine.

Knowledge about how much pain each side is willing to absorb is usually the most difficult information to obtain in war. Both sides always exaggerate their capacity for pain, because if your opponent knew you were willing to lose only one division, he would just hang on until you reached that breaking point. Successfully prosecuting a war, in other words, places what makes rational sense in conflict with what makes psychological sense: You need to deceive your opponent into believing you can tolerate huge losses. In fact, said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, you probably have to deceive yourself about it, too.

During the Vietnam War, Mueller said, the United States assumed that beyond a certain point of losses, the North Vietnamese would break.

"Both sides in Vietnam talked about staying the course -- the issue is whether they were really ready to do it," Mueller said. As it turned out, the North Vietnamese were willing to accept casualties on a scale virtually unprecedented in the history of combat. Vietnam War-era Secretary of State Dean Rusk once calculated that North Vietnamese losses in the war, when measured as a proportion of population, were the equivalent of the United States losing about 10 million lives. American losses in Vietnam, by that same measure, were 175 times smaller -- but even that was too high.

"There was a breaking point," Mueller concluded. "It was the Americans who broke."


2. Resource Wars -- by William K. Tabb/Monthly Review

(This essay is adapted from a plenary presentation to the conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics, August 12, 2006.)

The close relation between war and natural resources is of long standing. What else was colonial conquest about? Vast estates held by the Dutch East India Company came under direct control of the Crown as did the lands conquered by the British East India Company. What was in demand in Europe dictated the commodities produced and the natural resources that were ripped from the earth. European violence set the terms on which resource extraction occurred. There was no free trade for mutual benefit based on comparative advantage. There were few constraints on the violence employed in the extraction of resources starting with the “shock and awe” of bombardments and fire storms of wars of conquest and followed by the pitiless subjugation of people of color. Having defeated the locals in battle the invaders suborned local elites and customs to extract resources from those they had conquered.

The form of the exploitative relationships with particular colonial and neocolonial overlords depended in large measure on the local traditions and social structures the invaders found. The Spanish used the Inca mita system of requisitioned labor for the mines where the subjugated died by the thousands from brutality and, as in the case of the vast silver mines of Potosi, by mercury poisoning. The crushed ore was mixed with mercury and trodden by the workers with their bare feet and then heated producing poisonous vapors. King Leopold murdered millions in the Congo employing slavery, terror, maiming, and mass killings because it was his view that “the colonies should be exploited, not by the operation of a market economy, but by state intervention and compulsory cultivation of cash crops to be sold to and distributed by the state at controlled prices.” 1

The Belgians ruled through Tutsi chiefs promoting them to a superior status over the Hutus and imposed compulsory cash crop demands through their Tutsi intermediaries. After independence Tutsi military dictators were left to rule. The animosities created provided the fear and hatred which led to genocide decades after independence. In the post-independence states without indigenous capitalism, but with only a comprador class, control of state revenues and natural resources were the major sources of wealth. After independence, control of the army and the power to coerce, following the colonial model, became the norm in many new nation states. In the struggles which broke out after independence and frequently under Cold War pressures it was often the most violent and ruthless elements willing to do whatever was necessary to gain control who came out on top—especially where there were easily exploitable resources to be appropriated and make those commanding them rich beyond imagining. The new nation’s economy remained entwined with that of the former colonial power. More democratically inclined indigenous leaders could be coerced and assassinated. sponsored civil war and military coups could be employed to maintain access on favorable terms to resources.

Resource extraction in the contemporary era continues to spur extremes of violence and war. In a 1997 study Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner examined the economic performance of ninety-five countries between 1970 and 1990. 2They found the higher a country’s dependence on natural resource exports the slower their economic growth rate. Paul Collier and co-authors analyzed fifty-four large-scale civil wars that occurred between 1965 and 1999 and found that a higher ratio of primary commodity exports to GDP “significantly and substantially” increases the risk of conflict. 3High levels of oil dependence correlate especially strongly. Timber it turns out is also “technologically suited to rebel predation,” as with the Khmer Rouge. Researchers find the phenomenon of “war booty futures” where outsiders back rebel groups in exchange for a future share of the takings—a prospect which features heavily in Richard K. Morgan’s powerful dystopic novel Market Forces.

It should be pointed out that when we speak of wars in the last third of the twentieth century we are talking about civil wars. Between 1965 and 1999 if we look at those wars in which more than a thousand people were killed a year, there were seventy-three civil wars, almost all driven by greed to control resources—oil, diamonds, copper, cacao, coca, and even bananas. Collier and Anke Hoeffler find countries with one or two primary export resources have more than a one-in-five chance of civil war in any given year. 4In countries with no such dominant products there is a one in a hundred chance. In these civil wars more than 90 percent of casualties are civilians. At the start of the twentieth century war casualties were 90 percent soldiers. Such “traditional” wars are rare today. Resource wars with their devastating impacts on civilians have become the norm.

Indeed, the oil rich countries of Africa—Nigeria, Gabon, the Sudan, the Congo, Equatorial Africa, and Chad—have long histories of coups, military rule, and strongmen. Millions have died of hunger and disease as a result of wars over oil, diamonds, copper, and other resources as armed rebels steal, rape, and murder making life-generating economic activity difficult if not impossible. In the Congo, one of the resource richest countries on the planet, a half dozen countries have armies deployed and countless rebel groups have fought to control rich deposits of gold, diamonds, timber, copper, and valuable cobalt and coltan in what is often referred to as “Africa’s First World War.” Global Witness reports that despite being the fourth largest oil producer in Africa, Congo Brazzaville has overseas debt of $6.4 billion as a consequence of Elf Aquitaine, the former French state oil company’s strategy of influence peddling and bribery.

In Angola, Joseph Savimbi, backed by foreign powers from the Cold war, amassed a reported $4 billion from diamonds, ivory, and other resources sold abroad in his decades of looting and brutality before he was killed. In Angola a million people died in the civil war, one child in five does not live to its fifth birthday, and 40 percent of Angola’s population has been displaced. Almost none of the income from the state-owned oil company found its way to Angola but was instead diverted to overseas banks. It was the wholesale looting of Angola’s oil revenues that fueled that country’s vicious civil war.

Africa bleeds because of its abundant wealth. Charles Taylor privatized the resources of Liberia by selling rights to resources to foreign companies and pocketing the money. There is the case of Dafur in the oil rich Sudan. There is Nigeria, exceedingly rich in oil and corruption, where foreign aid is badly needed. The environment of the Niger Delta is being destroyed, and people are killed by army thugs protecting Shell oil. Equatorial Guinea is a criminalized state which receives half a billion in oil revenues. Because of this, it ranks sixth in the world in per capita income but third from the bottom in the UN’s human development index table. a third of the population has been killed or driven into exile. The revenues of the Cameroon-Chad pipeline operated by Exxon-Mobile, with additional investment from ChevronTexaco, do not help the people of the area who remain among the poorest of the poor as the natural wealth of their land is looted.

Wherever there are resources to be plundered we find foreign companies ready to cooperate; often there is the World Bank to put a smiley face on these atrocities, claiming things would be worse if they did not supervise the corruption. The reality of the bank’s role however is quite different. Emil Salim, a former Indonesian environment minister who led the World bank Extractions Industries Review, has written, “The bank is a publicly supported institution whose mandate is poverty alleviation. Not only have the oil, gas and mining industries not helped the poorest developing countries, they have often made them worse off.” 5That is from the man the World Bank chose to review its past practices. He points out that scores of academic assessments as well as the bank’s own reports correlate corruption, civil war, and growing poverty with reliance on extractive industries, comparing unfavorably with the performance of more diversified economies.

While the cases I have mentioned focus on the relationship between resources and war in Africa, Salim’s own country is also an example of this relationship. Indonesia can be seen as analogous to a nineteenth-century empire. The central government exploits the territories, especially those rich in resources, along lines similar to what was done by the Europeans. Jakarta conducts a dirty war in Aceh, its northern province rich in natural gas and rife with civilian killings and disappearances. The Indonesian state has waged a campaign of terror and near genocide in oil and natural gas rich East Timor. Exxon-Mobil is the largest long-term investor in Indonesia. The foreign owned gold and copper mines of Irian Jaya, where miners die while working or are killed by security forces and the environment is devastated making life difficult for the province’s people, are an international scandal. In West Papua logging companies with close ties to the military have terrible reputations as well for using force against locals as they displace tribal people from their land and destroy the local ecosystem. The atrocities carried out by the military and the government in pursuit of revenues from their resources frequently require the cooperation of foreign transnationals and are supported by World Bank project aid.

Ted Koppel, writing in the New York Times (February 24, 2006), responded to what he described as the Bush administration’s “touchiness” about the charge that we are in Iraq because of oil by stating the obvious, though often unsaid, truth, “Now that’s curious. Keeping oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz has been bedrock American foreign policy for more than half a century.” Today control over the world’s oil supply is at the forefront of Washington policy makers’ thinking, even if the president and his team deny any such intent and talk publically of reducing dependence on Middle East oil by three-quarters of present levels, an absurdly impossible goal. Two-thirds of the oil in the world is in the Middle East, much of it under Iraq and Iran, the axis of oil, the current targets of the U.S. war on terrorism. Control of oil is integral to Washington’s official goal of world domination, a goal stated this baldly in national security documents.

During the administration of the first President Bush, the Pentagon under then defense secretary Dick Cheney produced a strategy paper stating the mission of “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” The United States would defend their interests for them and so the policy was to “discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.” 6Control of the world is facilitated through control of essential resources. By controlling the world’s energy, and in the presence of its overwhelming military superiority, the United States is potentially able to deny the lifeblood of any society and intimidate and coerce the world more effectively, a design going back easily to Henry Kissinger, and earlier to the emergence of U.S. global power at the end of the Second World War, but now carried to new heights by the neoconservatives.

Hegemony has always been a bipartisan consensus. With regard specifically to the Middle East we have the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Since Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force with this intervention in mind the United States has moved to forward positioning, the establishment of a huge permanent military presence in the region, including a number of multi-billion dollar bases in Iraq, huge fortified cities with all the comforts of home, fast food places, video stores, and car rental agencies for the soldiers who garrison the empire along “the arc of instability.” All of this takes place in territories which coincide with the parts of the Global South where oil is found. That the official rationale is now the war on terrorism in place of anticommunism is secondary to the continuation of the basic policy of world domination.

Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood for Oil , cites British defense secretary John Reid’s warning that climate change “will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer” and so “make the emergence of violent conflict more likely.” 7In the United States, too, military planners and the CIA spin out scenarios of wars for desperately needed natural resources and the need to deal with the mass migrations of desperate people as entire societies disintegrate. Climate change, these forecasts suggest, will bring on new and even greater resource wars. The United States with its overwhelming advantage in all things military is likely to see saber rattling, shock, and awe as the best responses. “When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” seems the appropriate metaphor for the petro-political situation. Some Americans, afraid of not being able to heat their homes and fill the tanks of their gas guzzling cars, may unthinkingly offer support for new foreign adventures—but Iraq has shown such oil comes at a high cost in blood and treasure.

It seems it is not all that easy to shock, awe, invade, and occupy countries. In the spring of 2006, 60 percent of Americans told the Gallup Poll that they did not think it worth going to war in Iraq and 74 percent disapproved of Bush’s handling of gasoline prices. They saw neither victory nor an easy exit and they had become suspicious that higher energy prices seemed to accompany such adventurism. Some worried about the U.S. balance of payments and some even knew that energy costs equaled a third of the trade deficit. Before the war, Lawrence Lindsey, then Bush’s senior economic adviser, suggested the war would cost $200 billion. He was sacked soon thereafter by an administration that insisted the war would cost $50–60 billion. Current estimates by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz are in terms of trillions of dollars.

The relationship of demand and supply of oil is complicated. It takes up to ten years and billions of dollars to get a new field into production. Refineries also take time to build and are hugely expensive. The present shortage of gasoline, often seen as a conspiracy by the oil giants, is in the main the result of rising demand especially from China and India, and supply shocks due to political events such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and uncertainty over the Bush administration’s intentions toward Iran and perhaps other producer states. When oil prices spiked in the 1970s the supply response was so great that the price of crude collapsed by 1986. In the 1990s demand growth was slow, no new fields were developed to increase production levels, and even so the price collapsed again in 1998–99. This is not to say that huge profits were not made by the Western oil companies as well as OPEC and the banks which recycled petro-dollars. Since then there has been little excess capacity—in 2005 the world’s excess capacity was 2–3 percent. It had been 15 percent in 1986.

Those who would deny even the possibility of any conspiracy point out that the international oil companies have complete control over only 7–8 percent of global crude oil and access to perhaps 20 percent of reserves. They are therefore unlikely to have conspired to produce today’s high energy prices. This is a cyclical industry and conjunctural events are responsible for most oil spikes. Events such as Vice President Cheney’s remarks during a visit to Lithuania in the spring of 2006 when he criticized Russia for using oil and natural gas as “tools of intimidation and blackmail,” and the intense negotiations to build pipelines for oil and natural gas from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, or Uzbekistan without going through Iran or Russia, serve to illustrate that global market shares for particular companies are not the most crucial factors in understanding oil as a weapon.

It is analysis rather than an apology for Big Oil that tells us that the situation has changed since the end of the Second World War when the so-called seven Sisters dominated the world oil market. Today Exxon-Mobil produces less than 3 percent of world output and the seven largest oil companies control less than 5 percent of world reserves. This does not mean that Exxon-Mobil is not the world’s most valuable and most profitable company nor that the oil giants do not benefit from high oil prices. They do however face more sophisticated national oil companies from China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere who compete for supply which is increasingly under the control of state-controlled producers. The seven largest national oil companies, like Kuwait Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Algeria’s Sonatrach, and the more familiar Saudi Aramco, hold at least half the world’s proven resources and account for a quarter of current production. 8Like Venezuela’s national oil company, which fuels Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, they have changed the distributional equation nationally as well as globally.

The days of unalloyed Anglo-American petroleum dominance are gone, and that is why the hegemonic state and its coalition partner, no-longer-so-great Britain, are using force to reassert dominance not through corporate control so much as state terror and coercion. While there can be no question that the national oil companies have changed the distribution of revenues from the grossly exploitative terms of pre–Second World War Anglo-American total dominance, the governments of the Middle East retain limited room to maneuver where the national interests of the United States and its thirst for oil are concerned. The long shadow of Washington darkens and dominates the politics of the region. Price-supply conditions have been set in the past by Saudi Arabia, which has acted to prevent problems for the advanced capitalist economies. It is less certain that they can continue to do so. It is surely in the interest of the hegemonic state and its British ally to gain greater purchase over supply conditions through regime change and closer working relations with new producers in the Caspian Basin and in Africa.

As to peak oil, predictions of the end of oil have been made often in the past and it is not clear that frightening scenarios will play out in the short run that some suggest. There are complex issues of geology, technology, and prospective efficiency considerations. The accepted definition of proven reserves includes what is known and can be exploited economically with existing technology. Both price and potential supply are conservatively estimated for this purpose, although some experts suggest that producers have a strong interest in overestimating their reserve position. Because OPEC quotas are based on proven reserves it is in the interest of members to greatly exaggerate their reserves so they can pump more. Such “political barrels” are estimated to be 44 percent of the total reserves OPEC claims. Russia’s reserves are also uncertain but probably 30–40 percent lower than officially claimed. 9Some countries have been extracting large amounts of crude but maintaining the same proven reserves figures. Companies too have incentive to exaggerate their reserves. In 2006 Shell had to admit it had overestimated its reserves by nearly a third and its stock price promptly fell. Finally it is also the case that for the past two decades the oil taken out of the ground has exceeded new discoveries.

However, since only a little over a third of oil in known fields can be recovered today, technological innovation can be expected to increase the proven reserve figure. Among the optimists, Leonardo Maugeri wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Put simply, the world will continue to have plenty of oil.” 10 In his view oil experts generally underestimate supply and overestimate demand. Like other optimists he believes China’s demand for oil is due to extraordinary circumstances that may not last and that demand in much of the industrialized world appears to have reached its peak and faces long-term decline. That is one view. Others point out that between 1992 and 2002 world oil demand grew by 1.5 percent, by 1.9 percent in 2003, and by 3.7 percent in 2004, with China’s demand increasing by 7.6 percent in 2003 and 15.8 percent in 2004. To say that it may not keep growing at this rate may be sensible, but it will surely keep growing and it will not be alone.

Even for those as optimistic as Maugeri, the question of who controls the oil cannot be irrelevant. The U.S. state through threat, intimidation, and violence wants its ham fist on the spigot, allowing it to blackmail other countries. U.S. imperialism has exerted control over the Global South through the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. During the Cold War it used the threat of communist Russia and China to keep Europe and Japan under its “leadership.” It is now attempting to use terrorism in the same way, not altogether successfully as it is turning out since its invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have failed to produce stable governments. Its actions have produced more terrorists and alienated most of the world. Seeking control over oil for leverage does not seem a far fetched stratagem for the oil soaked Bush-Cheney administration.

The most effective resistance to this imperialist pattern now is coming from Latin America where Hugo Chávez has been repeatedly elected and won referenda because he has stood up to the United States and used his country’s oil revenues to raise living standards of the poor of his nation. In April 2006, Petroleos de Venezuela increased its stake in major projects to 60 percent from 40 percent as well as increasing its royalty cut. In Bolivia Evo Morales nationalized the energy industry, causing the United States to express disapproval regarding Morales’s “weak commitment to democracy” (echoing its charge against Chávez). However, Bolivia’s first elected indigenous president, according to the leading polling organization in the country, enjoyed an 80 percent approval rating in the spring of 2006 while George W. Bush’s approval rating was at 33 percent among his country’s citizens. Like Chávez who had suffered at least one coup attempt, Morales has to confront a military whose officers, trained at the School of the Americas, are not, as the press delicately put it, “a natural ally of Mr. Morales.” Such developments in Latin America and similar manifestations of petro-nationalism elsewhere along with the general decline in U.S. prestige and authority in the world have led Thomas Friedman to suggest we are now in the post-post-cold war era in which, “U.S. power is being checked from every corner.” 11 The major enemies of the United States somehow seemed to be oil producers, a group of countries that given the current high energy prices cannot be easily intimidated through economic sanctions or political pressure.

To cheerleaders for U.S. imperialism it is the ineptitude of the Bush-Cheney policies, not their goals, that receive criticism. The critique of anti-imperialists now includes a maturing ecological consciousness. Struggles over energy are being conceptualized more usefully in terms of the economic system as well as energy alternatives. Indeed there is growing awareness that the final resource war will likely be for the planet’s survival. Currently, only 1.25 percent of China’s population possesses a car. If car ownership in that country were to reach the U.S. level, and the forecasts are that in 2031 China will have a per capita income close to that of the United States in 2004, China would have a billion vehicles. If they all needed to run on gasoline there is simply not enough oil and of course the greenhouse gases produced would heat things up distressingly. One hopes for technological breakthroughs but the precautionary principle suggests some major changes are in order as global energy consumption presses on available supply. A system that privileges accumulation over sustainability, individualism over solidarity, cannot be accepted.

The scarcity of other resources may prove serious as well. For example, today one in four people on the planet do not have access to safe drinking water; 12 percent of the world’s population consumes 86 percent of available fresh water. With global consumption of fresh water doubling in the next twenty years, there are all sorts of water war scenarios. Already five million people die a year from diseases related to contaminated water. China’s rapid industrialization has been accompanied by water contamination affecting 300 million people, that is nearly a third of the population. Kofi Annan’s Millennium Report tells us that if present trends continue two out of three people on the planet will live in countries considered to be “water stressed.” The World Bank projects that 40 percent of the people living in the world of 2050 will face some form of water shortage. In Palestine, Israel’s commandeering of scarce water is a major issue and on many other borders water conflicts are major occurrences.

The resource war against the environment will be better avoided when we stop counting consumption of nature as income, as a free good, while we deplete our natural capital, as Herman Daly and others have long suggested. The past rates of accumulation of capital which are now blithely projected forward were possible because of the unsustainable usage of natural resources. Mainstream economists have a great deal of responsibility for ignoring the distinction between natural capital and humanmade capital. Fortunately many world citizens take conservation and recycling seriously and consider a very different set of policies essential. They are ready to challenge the presumptions of a consumer society which has ignored the limits of the biosphere and resource base of our planet. How we respond to these resource pressures will determine what kind of society we shall have and what sort of planet ours will be.

The dramatic changes which will be required raise central issues regarding the logic of capitalism. Writing from prison in 1915 and facing the likely prospect of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg in her Junius Pamphlet famously argued that humanity faced the choice between socialism or barbarism. “We stand today,” she wrote, “between the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.” The ecological crisis we face and the prospect of future resource wars make her warning all the more salient.

[William K. Tabb taught economics at Queens College for many years, and economics, political science, and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2004), Unequal Partners: A Primer on Globalization (The New Press, 2002), and The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2001). He can be reached at william.tabb@gmail.com]

Notes:
Peter Duignan & Lewis H. Gann, The Rulers of Belgian Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 30; also see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998).
Jeffrey D. Sachs & Andrew Warner, “Fundamental Sources of Long-Run Growth,” American Economics Review , May 1997.
See Paul Collier, “Natural Resources, Development and Conflict: Channels of causation and Policy Interventions,” World Bank, April 28, 2003.
4. Paul Collier & Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and grievance in civil war,” Oxford Economic Papers , October 2004.
Extractive industries Review Secretariat, http://www.eireview.org/eir/eirhome.nsf .
Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop; A One-Superpower World; Pentagon’s Document Outlines Ways to Thwart Challenges to Primacy of America,” New York Times , March 8, 1992.
Michael T. Klare, “The Coming Resource Wars” March 7, 2006, http://TomPaine.com.
Valerie Marcel & John V. Mitchell, Oil Titans: National Oil Companies in the Middle East (London: Chatham House/Brookings, 2006).
Nicolas Sarkis, “Addicted to crude,” Le Monde Diplomatique , May 2006, 4.
Leonardo Maugeri, “Two Cheers for Expensive Oil,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006), 155.
Thomas L. Friedman, “The Post-Post-Cold War,” New York Times, May 10, 2006.


3. THE PROBLEM OF SMALL ARMS IN AFRICA
SMALL ARMS – THE WORLD'S FAVOURITE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
By Hugh McCullum/ At Issue Ezine

Intro: Small arms, particularly the ubiquitous AK-47, are the real weapons of mass destruction in the 21st century. They are responsible for more deaths than any other, especially in Africa. AK-47s are too cheap and too available in places like the Horn of Africa (Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia), the pastoralist areas of East Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the oil-rich Delta Region of Nigeria. Something must be done to control the supply of small arms whose lucrative source is primarily the five permanent members of the Security Council, the networks of arms brokers who get them to the trouble spots of Africa, and the poverty and unemployment that provide willing hands to use them.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its childrenÖ This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” --Former U.S. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech on April 16, 1953

The statistics are mind-numbing. A decade after Canada spearheaded the campaign that made landmines illegal, 309,000 people were killed this year (2006) by small arms. There are 650 million guns ñ leave out the smart bombs, giant artillery and tanks, the mortars, the missiles, the weapons of armies, air forces and navies ñ in circulation world-wide, one for every 10 people on the planet. Put another way, with 16 billion units of military ammunition produced every year, there are small arms and ammunition enough to shoot every man, woman and child on the planet twice.

Such figures on their own mean little, of course, if it were not for the fact that the easy availability of arms, especially in Africa, increases the incidence and impact of armed violence, triggers conflict and provokes local armed struggles into fullscale wars once they break out. Retired UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calls them "weapons of mass destruction in slow motion."

It gets worse:
The five permanent members of the Security Council are the five top exporters of small arms selling 88 percent of the worldís supply (rifles, pistols, light machine guns called Kalashnikovs or AK-47s, hand grenades and landmines ñ the latter are illegal but still widely manufactured and used);
Late in 2006, the vast majority of members of the UN General Assembly voted to begin working on a treaty to ban small arms;† 24 abstained, including China, Russia, Pakistan and India, the worldís leading manufacturers and sellers; and one country, the U.S., voted an outright "no" to the treaty. President George W. Bush, a close ally of the US gun lobby, effectively vetoed negotiations on a new global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT);

Children can easily use small arms. They are simple to transport and hide, ready to use without much prior training and, in most cases, require little maintenance and support. Because of this, small arms have helped create more than 300,000 child soldiers. Children are also primary victims. The increased availability of small arms through† illegal channels has contributed to an alarming rise in child casualties in African conflicts where small arms have been used. More than 4 million children have been killed, 8 million have been disabled and 15 million left homeless (UNICEF).

It is estimated that 100 million small arms exist in Africa, especially around the Horn, including Somalia, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, the violent belt of Central Africa and many areas of West Africa. Accurate figures are hard to obtain. Even Africa has its manufacturers and illicit sales. Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa and Zimbabwe all have manufacturing and distribution factories and illicit sales networks. AK-47s can be bought in some countries on the open market for as little as the price of a sack of flour or a chicken. In some countries like Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, guns are part of the culture, almost everyone carries a personal weapon. Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa, along with Nigeria and Ghana in the west, blame the proliferation on huge increases in violent crime.

South Africaís retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described the small arms trade in Africa as "the modern day slave trade which is out of control. It continues because of the corruption and complicity of most governments in sub-Saharan Africa, including I am sad to say my own beloved country, which turn a blind eye to the appalling suffering associated with the proliferation of these weapons. The world could eradicate poverty in a few generations," he stated, "if a fraction of the spending here on small arms was spent on peace."† Along with the Dalai Lama and other world religious leaders, Tutu published a letter to the Times newspaper in London prior to the UN vote on Oct. 29, 2006.

Nothing symbolizes the proliferation of small arms in Africa like the ubiquitous Kalashnikov or AK-47 assault rifle, first invented by the Russian General Mikhail Kalashnikov during World War II. Today it is estimated that between 60 and 70 million of these† durable weapons are spread around the world. Itís the gun of choice in all of Africaís conflicts and is for sale in many places for less than US$30. It will remain the most widely-used weapon in conflict zones for at least the next 20 years because it is so poorly regulated. According to a new report by the Control Arms campaign:

The Kalashnikov is manufactured in more countries and is being used to cause more widespread suffering today than at any time in its 60-year history. Many thousands of people are killed every year by the weapon because there is little international control on its production, sale and use. ( AK-47: The World's Favourite Killing Machine , June 26, 2006.)

The report estimates that up to 70 million AK-47s are found in the state arsenals of at least 82 countries and are produced in at least 14 countries. The widespread availability of surplus Kalashnikovs and the absence of global standards and laws to regulate their transfer make it easy for the weapons to fall into the hands of unscrupulous arms brokers, armed militia and criminals.

The widespread availability of the AK-47 and its variants is a legacy of the Cold War. Millions of AK-47s were also supplied to various regimes during the period and these are still in circulation, now being traded by numerous firms and governments across the globe.

"The AK-47 is a symbol of the way in which the arms trade has run amok, destroying lives and livelihoods. Only global rules to control who produces the weapons and to whom they are sold will ensure that they don't fall into the wrong hands," said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

Kalashnikovs, of course, are not the only small arms being sold illegally. The much prized Israeli Uzi is valued for its strength, lightness and accuracy, but it is many times more expensive than an AK-47. American† M19s and a plethora of US sniping rifles are also sold illegally but are too expensive in the developing world for more than a few elites. South Africa produces seven types of assault rifles, also expensive compared with Kalashnikovs.

The purchase and supply of assault rifles, especially AK-47s, was dramatically altered after the Cold War ended. Now, tens of thousands of Kalashnikovs are bought, trafficked and brokered by a new breed of middlemen, international networks of companies, government agencies, and individuals in Europe, the Middle East and North America. These arms merchants are involved in complex supply chains to deliver assault rifles using brokering networks, freight-forwarders, transport firms, offshore bank accounts and other interconnected companies. These are now increasingly being joined† by some Western countries (including the US) and associated private contractors who traffic in surplus arms from former Warsaw Pact countries. Notable among these are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine and Belarus.

Critically, small arms trading is not illegal in most countries although the private ownership of such automatic weapons is banned in many countries, except for re-export. But all governments have a duty under international humanitarian law such as the Geneva conventions and protocols to ensure that their armed forces do not use these weapons for indiscriminate attacks on civilians. These standards should also apply to police and security officials and even paramilitaries where possible. Their use of Kalashnikovs and other assault weapons pose a much greater risk to civilians than "normal" police arms.†

As long as governments fail to uphold such human rights and standards and allow the sale and transfer of these weapons and their ammunition, mass civilian suffering will continue and grow. Similarly, as long as governments turn a blind eye, and even encourage, illegal arms merchants to supply criminal groups, mercenaries, rebel groups, smugglers and others who commit atrocities and abuse civilians, the deaths of women, children and the aged will continue unabated. It is just too easy to obtain licences to sell arms in countries such as those sitting on the Security Council.

In countries like Canada, Britain, France, US, Sweden, and others which pride themselves on democracy and the rule of law and which have signed on to all the international laws against weapons of mass destruction, it is business as usual with the licensed production of small arms. With these "legal" and lucrative production systems† comes the multiplication of supply networks. If lives are to be saved these distributors and their access to legally manufactured surplus stockpiles must be interdicted by global standards governing the movement and transfer of small arms.

The Control Arms campaign calls for four life-saving measures by governments and the international community:
Tough standards on arms transfers covering all small arms and light weapons and negotiations on a new global Arms Trade Treaty. To be effective, these global standards must cover national controls on production, transfer, holding and use of assault rifles of all kinds and other small arms and their ammunition;

All international arms and ammunition production licenses must be considered on a case-by-case basis before they are granted and no permits should be issued if there is a risk that transfers to areas of conflict or potential conflict could occur;

Existing stockpiles in known weapons manufacturing countries must be secured and managed with the accurate and honest record-keeping of inventories including serial numbers of every weapon. Surplus stockpiles should be destroyed;

Governments must increase efforts to reduce the demand for assault rifles through a series of integrated measures such as: reforming police and other law enforcement agencies; incorporating into law weapons collection strategies in post-conflict situations, peace-building programmes and the removal of surplus and illegal weapons and ammunition from all unauthorized users. Disarmament will benefit the whole community.

The beginning of this editorial quotes General Eisenhowerís famous speech of 1953 in which he deplored the military-industrial complex and said that money spent on arms could not be spent on development for the poor of the world. The same argument holds today in countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, DRC, Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Cote díIvoire and others rich in resources but poor in development. All are involved, or have been involved recently, in civil wars.

Last year, according to the International Herald Tribune , Russia surpassed the US for the first time as the leader in weapons deals with the developing world. These weapons deals in 2005 were part of the highly competitive global arms bazaar in the developing world, especially in the Middle East and Africa, which grew to US$30.2 billion, up from US$26.4 billion in 2004, a market the US has regularly dominated.† While many of these sales do not fall under the heading of small arms, a significant number, called "conventional arms" in a report by the Congressional Research Service, went to countries such as China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. India and China, in turn, sell them in large numbers to Africa.

The huge amounts of money spent on illegal arms and on bribing officials in Africa and other parts of the South diverts massive amounts of money that could be used to develop health care, education, infrastructure, housing and programmes to advance the rights of women and children.


"The huge amounts of money spent on illegal arms ... diverts massive amounts of money that could be used to develop health care, education, infrastructure, housing and programmes to advance the rights of women and children."


As long as† arms are cheap and† easily available, development experts say, there is little hope of solving the deep and deadly problems that beset Africa ñ from the brain drain of its most capable and well-educated people to the huge toll from HIV/AIDS, which is often worst in conflict zones.† Development goes hand-in-hand with disarmament. However, without the investment that creates jobs for hungry, angry, unemployed young men, countries recovering from civil wars can too easily slip back into conflict. Sudan and Darfur, the Horn of Africa and Central Africa all fit these categories right now.

The failure of most African countries to disarm fully after wars exacerbates underlying problems of poverty and underdevelopment. The situation is made worse by Western trade laws and "shock therapy" economic reform. Structural adjustment programmes and† trade violations, many Africans would say, get in the way of development. People suffer greatly and their desperation leads to a spiral of violence, fuelled by easy availability of small arms.

In the articles that follow in this series, regional situations in Africa where the small arms trade flourishes will be examined.

Select bibliography and links:
Arms Without Borders: Why a Globalised Trade Needs Global Controls . A report produced for the Control Arms Campaign by Amnesty International, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) and Oxfam, 2006.
Focus on Small Arms in Africa (a quarterly newsletter since March 2002). Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
"Implementation of the PoA in Africa" , Biting the Bullet Project (International Alert, Saferworld and University of Bradford), 2006.
McLean, Andrew (compiler). Tackling Small Arms in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa: Strengthening the Capacity of Sub-regional Organizations. Safer World 2000 Meeting Report, 7-8 May 2000.
Mirzeler, Mustapha & Crawford Young. "Pastoral Politics in the North East in Uganda: AK47 as Change Agent," Journal of Modern African Studies , vol. 38, no. 3, 2000.
Mkutu, Kennedy. "Pastoral Conflict and Small Arms: Uganda Border Region", Safer World, November 2000.
Reyneke, Eunice. Small Weapons and Light Weapons in Africa: Illicit Proliferation, Circulation and Trafficking. Proceedings of the OAU Experts Meeting and International Consultation May-June 2000. Institute for Security Studes, South Africa.
Saferworld (an NGO working to prevent†armed violence and create safer communities).
Venter, Al. "Arms Pour into Africa," New African , no. 370, January 1999, pp. 10-15.
Wood, Brian & Elizabeth Clegg. Controlling the Gun Runners: Proposals for EU Action to Regulate Arms Brokering and Shipping Agents. Safer World, February 1999.