Opinion

Though over 70 years have passed since World War II and it has been decades since the end of the cold war, peace has not yet settled on this planet. Rather, the danger of war has increased and the threat of a new cold war hangs over it. The main cause of it is the US, a class-A war merchant that sows only the seeds of war and manslaughter across the world with massive arms dealings, going against the desire of humankind for peace and stability.

It is a well-known fact that the US is the world’s largest arms exporter.

The volume of US arms exports does not fall, but continues to snowball with each passing year.

According to statistics published by the US State and Defense departments, it had arms sales of US$175 billion in the 2020 fiscal year which ended in late September 2020.

The rise in arms exports was reportedly due to the steps taken by the US authorities to relax regulations on arms export.

When the whole country suffers from the spread of the world pandemic, the American munitions monopolies liven up, making huge profits from the relaxation of control on arms export.

According to the statistics of the Stockholm international peace institute of Sweden, five armed clashes break out every day worldwide, four of which are committed with US-made weaponry.

At present, US-made weapons are dominant in the countries and regions where wars and other bloodshed continue and military confrontation is acute. Large quantities of weapons and ammunition spread by the US are widely used to instigate military dispute and civil war and disturb and undermine peace and security in several regions.

It is evidenced by the complicated Middle East situations.

According to information available, the US-made weaponry sold to the Middle East accounts for nearly half of the volume of its arms exports.

The US started the Iraqi war on the pretext of “anti-terror war” and officially brought a huge amount of lethal weapons into the Middle East, plunging the regional situation into a vicious cycle of terror and retaliation.

Most recently, the international charity organization Oxfam published a report, which revealed a fact that innocent civilians were killed or injured in Yemen by the weapons the US supplied.

It said 87 civilians were killed and 136 others injured in Yemen between January 2021 and February 2022.

Last year, The New York Times and CBS reported that the US sold military equipment worth US$54.6 billion to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which caused heavy civilian casualties.

Media outlets said that US-made fighter jets bombed a village in which a funeral was held, killing over 140 civilians, and a bus with students on board for field practice to kill 44. As a result, more than 150 000 civilians lost their lives in Yemen alone, they added.

The international community voices increasing demand that the US restrict arms sale to the Middle East out of serious concern over the violence rampant in the region. However, the US pays little attention to it and continues to sell weapons to other countries under the cloak of “aid for the purpose of defence”. Underlying the situation is the extreme selfish calculation that whatever happens to the personal safety of civilians it is the best to make hefty profits by fattening the munitions industry businesses.

The US conducts two kinds of transactions through arms export. The first one is to earn pecuniary interests through massive arms sale and export dispute and war to the strategic points. Another one is to satisfy the greed of munitions monopolies while creating power imbalance and conflicts in the related regions to find justifications for military intervention and occupy them by jamming armed forces into them under the signboard of “keeping peace” and “protection of human rights”.

The US, which is engrossed in seeking its own interests in utter disregard of the elementary human rights to existence and life, is the ringleader of manslaughter and human rights violation which is disqualified to talk about human rights and the disturber and wrecker of world peace. 

The class-A war merchant has no qualifications whatsoever to argue about peace and human rights.