ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607190025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
EAGER TO supply the world's arms needs, the U.S. government has a weapons-export policy that one day may blow up in its face - and quite possibly the faces of American soldiers abroad.
The Clinton administration has treated the sale of advanced conventional weapons as an extension of domestic economic policy, promoting exports in a short-sighted effort to protect defense-industry jobs. The strategy has helped the U.S. arms industry buttress profits while capturing almost half the sales to developing nations. Jobs, however, continue to be cut.
And the jobs that are saved are bought at a heavy price: continued taxpayer subsidies to help spread advanced weapons technology around a volatile world, sending military hardware to dubious allies in unstable regions, and stimulating the demand to develop still more advanced weapons.
Such short-term gain for long-term pain is insane.
An effort to exercise some global gun control is under way in the Senate with a bipartisan bill that would require scrutiny of arms sales to questionable governments. Such as this rogues' gallery: Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti. All are hot spots where U.S. troops in recent years have had to face adversaries armed with U.S. weapons.
Sponsored by Republican Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon, the legislation would limit U.S. weapons sales to nations that are democratically elected, guarantee human rights, are involved in no military aggression that violates international law, and participate in the United Nations Arms Register.
Each year the president would have to certify which nations qualify, and sales to any not on the list would have to be approved by both houses of Congress. That would force Washington at least to think about who can buy weapons developed for America's armed forces with American tax dollars.
John Q. Public likely assumes that such sales already are given careful thought. They aren't. Of approximately 250 license applications that come before Congress each year for arms deals worth more than $50 million, one former senior adviser to the House Armed Services Committee says, not one has been turned down in the past five years.
Such indiscriminateness reflects an ideology that sees the world as one big market - which it is - in which conventional arms are just one more product to hawk - which they are not. The spread of advanced weapons technology has foreign and military policy implications too often ignored. Washington needs to enact the Hatfield bill.
LENGTH: Short : 49 linesby CNB