STWR - Share The World's Resources

28th March 07 - David R. Francis, CSM

China now sees itself as a major power, and US defense spending is at its highest inflation-adjusted level since 1946.

A global arms race has picked up speed. Leading the pack is the United States, whose military spending exceeds that of every other nation on earth combined.

"It's not a spiraling thing," says Siemon Wezeman, an arms trade expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden.

Nonetheless, the "peace dividend" resulting from the end of the cold war has disappeared. World military expenditures slightly exceeded $1 trillion in 1990, a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, figures SIPRI. They again topped $1 trillion in 2005 (in inflation-adjusted 2003 dollars).

27th March 07 - Thalif Deen, IPS

The U.S.-led war on terror has triggered a strong backlash against some of the world's minorities, including ethnic and religious groups, according to a study released here on Tuesday. "The debate continues to rage about whether the 'war on terror' has made the world a safer place for the West," noted Mark Lattimer, director of the London-based Minority Rights Group (MRG) International. "But it has certainly made it a much more dangerous place for minorities."

Titled the "State of the World's Minorities", the 2007 edition of the annual study points out that some of the countries where minorities continue to be repressed include key allies of the United States in its war on terror, including Pakistan, Turkey and Israel. "U.S. allies have managed to barter their support for the war on terror in return for having their human rights record ignored," Lattimer said.

Somalia is "the world's most dangerous country for minority communities" and has overtaken Iraq to top a global ranking of countries where minorities are most under threat, according to the annual survey. Sudan has been ranked third. African states make up more than half of the top 20 list. Among the African countries where minorities are under attack are Sudan, Nigeria, Angola, Burundi and Rwanda.

22nd March 07 -  Christopher Brauchli ~ STWR member

If people in New Orleans and environs are feeling depressed at the pace of reconstruction they should take heart from Iraq. Unlike New Orleans, Iraq has not dropped off George Bush’s radar screen and nonetheless things continue to go badly on the reconstruction front.

According to the most recent quarterly report by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, there is precious little to show for the $21 billion Congress put into the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction fund created in 2003. Eighty percent of the money has been paid out. Seventy five million has been spent to rebuild the pipelines crossing the Tigris River at the Fatah pipeline crossing and not one pipeline has made it across. Parsons Corporation was paid $243 million for construction of 150 medical clinics. It completed 20 of the clinics. It received $72 million for construction of a police college in Baghdad that had to be closed because of sewage leaking from the ceiling.

20th March 07 - David Krieger, STWR

It is a great honor to celebrate with you the 40th anniversary year of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, officially called the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean.  This Treaty was a great achievement, and has served your region well.

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of knowing and working with Alfonso Garcia Robles, the great Mexican diplomat who was so instrumental in creating this treaty.  For his vision and commitment, he shared the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize with Swedish diplomat Alva Myrdal.

The Treaty of Tlatelolco paved the way and was a model for other Nuclear Weapon Free Zones – those in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia.  Today, virtually the entirety of the southern hemisphere is covered by Nuclear Weapon Free Zones.  Latin America and the Caribbean led the way in this important achievement. 

But, as great as the achievement has been in creating first the Nuclear Weapon Free Zone for Latin America and Caribbean, and then the southern hemispheric series of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones, it is not enough.  While regional efforts are useful, they cannot fully protect the people of the region from the effects of nuclear wars in other parts of the world.

When President George W. Bush presented his budget proposals recently for the fiscal year 2008, he emphasized that the nation’s security is his highest priority, and he backed up that declaration by proposing that the Pentagon’s outlays be increased by more than 6 percent beyond its estimated outlays for fiscal 2007, to a total of more than $583 billion. Although many Americans regard this enormous sum as excessive, hardly anyone appreciates that the total amount of all defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amount budgeted for the Department of Defense. Indeed, it is roughly almost twice as large.

In the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, the Pentagon spent $499.4 billion. Lodged elsewhere in the budget, however, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as—sometimes even more surely than—the money allocated to the Department of Defense. On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programs, but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized.

Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks
— A Tone Poem by Richard Strauss

It has an appealing symmetry. George Bush is deploying a missile defense system that may or may not work to defend against nuclear weapons that might be fired from Iranian secret weapons sites that may or may not exist. This strategy is of a piece with the rest of George Bush’s foreign policy strategies that have produced such successes as, for example, Iraq.

In February it was disclosed that Mr. Bush plans to plant a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Poland gets a missile battery and the Czech Republic gets a radar site. The United States has not declared the missile defense system fully operational. Under the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s approach to things military, the fact that the system is not operational is no reason not to deploy it. In 2003 Mr. Rumsfeld testified about the money being spent on deployment of an anti-defense missile system before it even worked explaining: “I happen to think that thinking we cannot deploy something until you have everything perfect, every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed, is probably not a good idea in the case of missile defense. I think we need to get something out there, in the ground, at sea, and in a way that we can test it, we can look at it, we can develop it, we can evolve it, and find out-learn from the experimentation with it."