“President Obama lifted a decades-long American arms embargo on Vietnam Monday and touted a new friendship with the United States’ former enemy,” usatoday.com reports. “‘Just a generation ago, we were adversaries and now we are friends,’ Obama said during a news conference in Hanoi . . . Obama described the arms embargo as ‘a lingering vestige of the Cold War’ that is no longer necessary as the U.S. and Vietnam continue the process of normalizing relations.” This on the heels of increased arm sales to Syrian “rebels,” some of whom you might call Islamic extremists. I have a few thoughts about this, and I bet you do too . . .
Arms are America’s largest export in terms of cash money. You don’t want to know what our balance of payments would look like if we weren’t selling weaponry to our allies (however unreliable they may be). So don’t be thinking that the President — and Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State — is OK’ing arms deals purely on the basis of political considerations.
Keep in mind that the CIA has been “secretly” funneling arms to “rebels” and other surrogates for decades. Lots of them: guns, explosives, grenades, shoulder-fired missiles, the lot. If you’re the CIA, it’s what you do.
In the case of Mexico (and everywhere else), the result is an entirely predictable “seepage” of all sorts of weaponry to some extremely bad actors. Far be it for me to suggest we should stop arming the Mexican military with machine guns, or at least demand accountability — for guns which are NOT included in the stats of American guns confiscated at “crime scenes.”
I don’t really have a beef with arming our “friends” abroad. International politics is all about political power which, as China’s ruthless dictator Chairman Mao told us, grows out of the barrel of a gun. The problem here: the double standard. The Obama Administration sells/gives guns to all and sundry in the name of foreign policy but wishes to disarm American citizenry. That ain’t right. But I guess you knew that.