The headline in the New York Times of Monday, August 12 said it all: "Flood Damage May Force Czechs to Abandon Jet Fighter Purchase."

The tone of the article suggested that this was a good thing, but not for a reason you might think--for example, celebrating the news that the Czech government, unlike, say, ours, might by din of necessity and however unwillingly be spending money on its own citizens' welfare rather than on buying expensive kill toys from foreign weapons dealers.

No, the reason we are to celebrate Prague's abandonment of a plan to spend $2 billion to buy 24 supersonic JAS 39 Gripen fighters is because they were being sold by a British and Swedish consortium, and the Czech government's scuttling of the deal might allow Lockheed to make the sale instead. The reason we are to be overjoyed at this news is because Prague might, in theory, now buy the kill toys from us.

This is the way of the world, and one of the ugliest and least-discussed impacts of corporate globalization and the interference in domestic spending priorities by international credit agencies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. [For more on this, see the accompanying interview with Vandana Shiva--Eds.]

Why, exactly, does the government of the Czech Republic need 24 supersonic JAS 39 Gripen fighters, at nearly $100 million each plus more money for years of upgrades and maintenance? To repel the invading Bulgarian Army? To have dogfights with the Polish Air Force? To confront some madman who seized control of the suddenly bellicose axis of Lithuania and Moldova?

Of course not. It takes the damage from a one-in-a-century flood to stop such a purchase because the Czech Republic, like other former Soviet bloc countries, had been expected to join NATO, did so, and as a condition of its admittance agreed to "modernize" its military--meaning, buy weapons from NATO countries. Fancy, expensive weapons, like the JAS 39 Gripen fighters.

Perhaps His Excellency the Czech President would like to see something nice in a Lockheed fighter jet instead? Take a ride, perhaps? (It goes really fast! Guys like that.) One need only set up an appointment with the local American embassy, which, in Prague as in a couple of hundred other capitals around the world, has taken as its primary mission in the last decade not just to promote American imports and secure favorable deals for US-based corporations, but specifically to sell US-made weapons.

The market for those weapons has been bustling, and the record four dozen wars--mostly civil--now being waged around the world are more a consequence of that market than a reason for it. When international outfits like the IMF start imposing conditions for loans and investment that limit a country's ability to spend money domestically, invariably this means slashing money for social needs. Welfare programs are junked, and as much of a government's services as possible is privatized--that is, opened up to foreign investment.

The one area in which governments are still allowed, and encouraged, to spend money--and spending money is frequently the only tool such governments have for generating jobs and pumping their often moribund economies--is on weaponry. Structural Adjustment Programs exempt arms sales, and outfits like Lockheed and British Aerospace leap in talons-first. Under the Clinton Administration, the U.S. government because vastly more aggressive about such deals, and thus far the Dubya team has eagerly followed suit.

In Seattle, where Boeing is responsible for an estimated quarter million jobs, this is generally seen as good news. But it cannot be good news for the people of Prague, or just about any other place. Because international armed disputes are rare these days, such weapons are generally used on the targets that are available--a country's own citizens. From Ecuador to Eritrea to Tajikistan, the approach of a government-owned helicopter or airplane is rarely good news. Such aircraft are far more likely to be aiming weapons than bringing sustenance.

Owing to our outsized budget for ordering, developing, and using these things, weapons of slightly less mass destruction are one of the only remaining world-class exports America offers. (Sociopathic CEOs are another.) The US government under Clinton and now Dubya has prioritized such exports, underwriting not just R&D but marketing costs and often the financing costs of any necessary loans. And, in the final irony, such deals have increasingly included "offset" provisions, in which a portion of the weapon is to be manufactured in the country buying it--effectively exporting American jobs as well as the jet or helicopter or tank. A jet sale is seen as good news in Seattle, yet Boeing has moved a third of its jobs elsewhere in the last four years--mostly to overseas subcontractors in countries which it would like to do more business. That's why the machinists are about to strike.

That's not the final irony, of course. The truly final irony is that when the U.S. deploys its own military to some country, as we seem to be doing every other week now, it is usually to face weapons that we not only made, but insisted on selling to the locals. (Or, to some other locals who promptly sold them on the open market.) This has two effects. The first, which everyone agrees is bad, is that we're making the weapons now being used to kill U.S. soldiers. The second, which is much better (according to certain decision makers), is that it forces the U.S. to spend even more money on its own weapons, to ensure that we have faster and fancier and deadlier weapons than they do. And then we can turn around and sell the old--er, "pre-shot"--stuff to the same countries. And we can point to a deficit budget and explain that we have to slash even more domestic social programs, while leaving trillions untouched in the military sector.

It's no coincidence that the US is now facing off against Saddam Hussein, who committed his worst war crimes (against Kurds and Iranians) when he was a faithful customer of US weaponry; or, previously, against the mujahadeen, likewise satisfied customers--or Filipinos, or Serbs, or Haitians, or Somalians, or Panamanians, or any number of other members of our buy-ten-get-a-free-Huey club. It's a vicious--make that deadly--cycle, and in those dozens of conflicts now raging, over 90% of the people dying are civilians.

But those folks aren't important; the people cashing the checks, they're the ones whose lives matter. If we could only master the technology for unleashing devastating floods, we'd be exporting that, too. Maybe outsourcing the manufacture of the release valves. And the Czech Republic, rather than its inexplicibly vulgar post-flood policy of aiding victims, would be doing what all "civllized" countries are now expected to do: create victims instead.