"Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe," notes report co-author William D. Hartung. "Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments."

"Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush??s pledge to ??end tyranny in our world?? than the United States?? role as the world??s leading arms exporting nation,

As in the case of recent decisions to provide new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan while pledging comparable high tech military hardware to its rival India, U.S. arms sometimes go to both sides in long brewing conflicts. And the tens of millions of U.S. arms transfers to Uzbekistan exemplify the negative consequences of arming repressive regimes.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/...WaW052505.html

United States has had the largest share of both new contracts and deliveries to the world for at least eight years in a row. None of the other countries dealing in weapons come even close to the US in the total amount of weapons delivered to developing nations over the past decade. The total value of arms transfer agreements the US signed with the developing countries was 54.8 billion dollars, which was more than the value of arms exports by all the other major arms suppliers (France, Russia, UK and China) put together during the same period.

http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsMay20...eatmay2005.htm