The Arms Trade

[Brian Peacock]

Today the UK court of appeal decided that the UK government's licensing of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia for the pursuance of the Kingdom's ongoing war with Yemen was illegal.

UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia unlawful, court of appeal declares


British arms sales to Saudi Arabia have been ruled unlawful by the court of appeal in a critical judgment that also accused ministers of ignoring whether airstrikes that killed civilians in Yemen broke humanitarian law.

Three judges said that a decision made in secret in 2016 had led them to decide that Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and Liam Fox and other key ministers had illegally signed off on arms exports without properly assessing the risk to civilians.

Sir Terence Etherton, the master of the rolls, said on Tuesday that ministers had “made no concluded assessments of whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law in the past, during the Yemen conflict, and made no attempt to do so”....

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/ju ... d-unlawful

The ruling doesn't mean that selling arms to Saudi Arabia is illegal, but that the government acted illegally by not explicitly considering the Saudi's record of deployment against civilians. One might presume then that the government avoided this consideration in order to rubber stamp the estimated £4.7bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since their campaign in Yemen began.

The granting of new licences for weapons exports to Saudi Arabia has been stopped pending a review, but arms trading will continue under licences already granted.

Many UK arms deals with Saudi Arabia are also supported by the Export Credit Guarantee scheme, whereby the government undertakes to cover companies and banks involved in export deals in the event an overseas buyer fails to pay or is late in paying. This essentially amounts to a form of socialism for the arms trade where the companies keep the profits while the taxpayer covers the losses.

There's two oft-heard arguments from the international arms trades:

1. Licensing regimes make weapons sales scrutable and legal.
1. If we don't do it somebody else will.

In this case I think the latter far outweighed the former, with the licensing regime being used to confer legality upon the export of weapons which the government knew were being used in the deliberate and targeted killing of civilians.

The oft-heard argument from governments is that licencing and underwriting protect jobs and supports technological innovation across sectors adjacent to the arms manufacturing as well as within it.

Do the benefits of state support for the weapons industry outweigh the costs or mitigate the moral qualms about the eventual end use of those products?

___
UK Court of Appeal Judgement: (PDF) https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/upl ... e-2019.pdf
UK Export credits and arms exports: https://www.caat.org.uk/issues/ecgd

[laklak]

Look at it this way - if you sell them the arms then you know the weak points when you have to fight them later.

[Sean Hayden]

I'm afraid that if we're looking for a moral philosophy on conflicts like these, one which can at least hope to be taken seriously, we can't move far from pacifism.

This is a problem not least because we need to rationalize some of our violence!

[Brian Peacock]

I think we can formulate a pacifism which justifies the use of violence in self defence. In fact, I think a lot of people, perhaps even most, accept self-defence as a sound justification for violence and the only sound justification for war. That's why it's often used in justification of war - a moral war is a defensive war. We might justify arms sales on that basis too, and is in part why UK law places this so-called 'rationality test' on ministers when considering the granting of export licences for weapons.

[Woodbutcher]

That's why gun owners are pacifists- they have guns for self defense. That's why they need open carry- so that the bad guys know they are prepared for self defense.

[laklak]

Hes right you know.jpg (16.69 KiB) Viewed 2741 times

[Rum]

I wonder if there are any statistics on how many bad guys/crimes have been stopped by ‘open carry’ nutjobs?

Thought not.

[Woodbutcher]

The problem seems to be that the open carry good guy looks just like the open carry nutjob does. Thus the proper solution is to open fire on the other guy if he as much as looks at you. Do not take the chance of assuming that the guy with the gun is actually OK. His family will understand. And if not, it just proves your point that he was a nutjob from a nutjob family.

[laklak]

I don't like open carry. I prefer to surprise them.

[Brian Peacock]

The problem seems to be that the open carry good guy looks just like the open carry nutjob does. Thus the proper solution is to open fire on the other guy if he as much as looks at you. Do not take the chance of assuming that the guy with the gun is actually OK. His family will understand. And if not, it just proves your point that he was a nutjob from a nutjob family.

While the issue of personal defence is, I think, substantially different to the one of national defence, I do accept the parallels between them you're talking about in that version of The Prisoners' Dilemma. Here 'defence' in both realms proceeds on the assumption that the other guys is probably a malicious idiot - but then again, we're all 'the other guy' to someone else eh? The fact that we might not trust 'the other guy' (each other) to handle weapons or act responsibly does not strike me as a very good reason to saturate the environment with weapons. Generating profits out of fears about the other guy however seems like an excellent reason to saturate the environment with weapons.

[Scot Dutchy]

The issue of personal defence depends on the morals of the society they apply to. If the society you live in depends and generates fear making it a requirement that you must look after your own personal defence then there must be a massive requirement to look and examine the society you live in. Surely the default is that everyone should live without fear and that is fear at all levels.
The arms trade depends on this ongoing fear throughout society. Without it the arms trade would not exist. This is especially true of adversarial societies where conflict is a ongoing daily problem where confrontation occurs at a drop of a hat. If there is no mechanism to deal with these conflicts it rapidly escalates acquiring even larger proportions which eventually reach a national and international level.
If the problems are solved at a society level there would be less international conflicts. A happy people dont want a conflict they want to resolve matters peacefully.
Maybe for those that require the assurance of a weapon in your pocket might just stop and think: "am I the first link in the chain". I would.
I am very happy I dont have to make that decision.

[Rum]

Its a neat idea, but I don’t think the link between the level of violence in a society and its likelihood to want to wage war and/or develop an arms trade holds water.

The most violent societies - I.e where murder rates and gun deaths are highest are in areas like Central America, the Caribbean and so on. These are not countries that are known for the outward looking belligerence, rather the crime/violence appears to be closely linked to poverty.

Currently there are only 11 countries in the world not involved in conflicts (look it up), if you include ‘adventures’ abroad. Sadly for now armed conflict remains very much the norm.

[Scot Dutchy]

Well that is YHO. I disagree. We are talking about so called civilised societies. If of course you would want to include the USA which of course you will shortly join.

[laklak]

As soon as the Queen takes a knee to Space Emperor Trump we'll let them in.

[Scot Dutchy]

Well a few months.