Spoils of War
John Tirman
The Free Press
The United States now exports more weapons than all other countries combined. What justifies continued American participation in this morally questionable enterprise?
In Spoils of War, John Tirman details the human, economic, and political dimensions of several major armaments deals brokered by the U.S. government. From New England factory floors to the back rooms of Congress to desperate Kurdish villages destroyed by U.S.-manufactured assault helicopters, Tirman unfolds an unforgettable story of intrigue and calamity.
This tale of modern warfare is told in three interwoven stories: the world of Washington policymaking; the hot spots of the Middle East, particularly Turkey; and a key venue of American arms manufacturing, Connecticut. These three disparate places have combined to produce one of the world’s great human-rights catastrophes—the village-by-village destruction of “Kurdistan,” the unsovereign homeland to 20 million people.
To grasp the evolution of the Middle East and its relations with the West, we reach back more than a thousand years; to understand the politics of American intentions, we reach back to Richard Nixon’s presidency; to see how Connecticut’s prosperity became so dependent on the military, we reach back to the American Revolution. By the 1970s, the three eras are brought together forcefully: Washington is exporting weapons—often made in Connecticut—to Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere in the region, with uncommonly stark consequences.
The different eras and locales demonstrate the sheer complexity of American-Islamic confrontation in the late twentieth century; they also show the utterly destructive role military largesse has played. The story encompasses not only folly and miscalculation but also suggestions for gracefully winding down the military-industrial complex from its Cold War excesses. Tirman doesn’t simply blame the avaricious or amoral posturing of American leaders but lays out how the embrace of specious ideas about the Muslim world and American power has led to one failure after another in the region.
No one book has joined all these elements to give a comprehensive moral and empirical portrait of the modern arms business. Spoils of War makes a powerful argument that our own economy can break its dependency on what amounts to the sale of death—and that the moral costs are so great that the United States should cease exporting weapons altogether.
John Tirman is executive director of the Winston Foundation for World Peace in Washington, D.C., which he has headed for ten years. Previously he was a reporter for Time magazine and senior editor and director of communications at the Union of Concerned Scientists. From 1993 to 1997 he was cochair of the board of the Foundation for National Progress, which publishes Mother Jones and Mo Jo Wire. Tirman has written dozens of articles for a wide range of periodicals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Esquire. He is author, or coauthor and editor, of four previous books. Tirman lives in Washington, D.C. | 
