And Weapons for All

In this provocative indictment of the U.S. arms trade, William D. Hartung reveals the greed, deception, and misguided thinking that fuel weapons sales abroad, poisoning our foreign policy and undermining our democratic institutions.
“The ongoing scandal at the heart of U.S. foreign policy is that the United States government has become world arms dealer number one,” Hartung writes. The American role in the arming of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is by now well known, as are the unsavory machinations behind the Iran/Contra affair, but Hartung persuasively shows that such attempts to achieve policy objectives through weapons sales, far from representing isolated misjudgments, have become a staple of U.S. diplomacy throughout the world.
Hartung’s lively analysis takes us behind the scenes to events such as a 1991 conference on “Defense Exports in the Post-Desert Storm Environment,” which brought Pentagon and State Department officials, arms industry executives, corporate lobbyists, and foreign customers together to rub shoulders and attend panels on such topics as how to influence the development of arms export laws. From the Gulf War to the current state of armed chaos in Somalia, And Weapons for All demonstrates in compelling detail that U.S. reliance on arms exports as a policy tool is as shortsighted as it is heavy-handed.