Saturday, November 12, 2016

Iraq Arms Imports by Country - SIPRI

Iraq Arms Imports by Country
So, I was looking through some statistics the other day for the fun of it and I finally found a source I forgot about years ago, regarding the importation of arms in to Iraq. According to the Stockholm International peace research institute or, SIPRI, between the years of 1955 and 2005 (when the Saddam regime began to take off and wane), the soviet Union Gave 31,067 million dollars or, 31 billion dollars worth of weapons and military equipment to Iraq, France gave 5512 or 5.5 billion dollars worth of equipment, and China gave 4278 million dollars worth of equipment of, 4.3 billion dollars. This is out of 44896 million total dollars or, 45 billion, in 1990's dollars, or 40.8 billion out of 44 billion dollars, or literally over 90% of all weapon's sales to Iraq. His military was made predominately of Chinese, Soviet and French weaponry, so it's not surprising that the majority of money was made by these three countries. 

What makes this interesting is that you hear a lot of talk about the U.S. propping up the Dictator when it seems, second only to the Soviet union, France was one of the biggest supplier of arms to them. The U.S. supplied 279 million dollars to Iraq. Now, most of this was general humanitarian aid, food and some helicopter parts. This makes up about .62% of all the military assistance given to the country. Now, common sense and intuition tells us that, this likely did very little to actually prop up the dictator. 

So, another interesting figure to look at are the three countries who opposed the Iraq War in the United Nations Security Council. Of the 15 or so members, this was China, Russia, and France, the three countries who gave him the most arms. A lot has been said about Iraq oil. However, no American oil company is receiving oil from Iraq, and the majority of the profits are going to China, France and Russia. [1][2] In fact, during the oil Embargo it was Russian, France and China that violated it and illegally traded oil with Iraq, while the U.S. was one of the few countries that abstained from this when it could have easily jumped on board and bought the oil without an invasion. It seems more so that, France Russia and China were opposed to the war in fear of disrupting their oil trade, rather than America stealing it for themselves. 

In fact, it makes no sense that by invading a country we could have simply stolen all the oil in the first place. Now, these are merely facts, take from it what you will. But hopefully this can shed some light on information you may not have known, before. All of this is irrelevant of course as one only need to look at the Iraq government's weapons, that is Ak-47's, T-72 tanks, dragnuv sniper rifles and so on to understand they were supplied by the soviets and Chinese. It doesn't take a genius to understand that when millions of Russian weapon's pop up in the hands of a country, that they were likely supplied by Russia. The fact Russia admits to it and we can track the weapon's sales are just icing on the cake. 

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