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According to the latest figures released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Washington provided over $74 billion worth of weapons and military training to Middle Eastern nations during 1991-2000.
The updated figure through 2004 would be over $80 billion, according to military analysts monitoring the Middle East. The largest single arms buyer was Saudi Arabia, accounting for about $33.5 billion dollars worth of U.S. weapons, followed by Israel ($18.8 billion), Egypt ($12.7 billion), Kuwait ($5.5 billion) and the UAE ($1.4 billion).
The weapons delivered included state-of-the-art fighter planes, combat helicopters, warships, sophisticated missile systems, armored personnel carriers and battle tanks. Although Israel is the only major Middle Eastern arms buyer that is a regular participant in the UN register, it is also the primary political reason why Arab nations boycott the project.
"We have no intentions of participating in the register as long as Israel gets away with its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons," an Arab diplomat was quoted by a news agency.
The register records arms imports and exports in seven specific categories of conventional weapons: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large caliber artillery systems, fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, warships and missiles and missile launchers. But it excludes both weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and also small arms, the weapons of choice in ongoing civil wars and ethnic conflicts worldwide, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Egypt made its only submission to the register in 1992, the year it was created. Jordan, Qatar, Lebanon and Libya have made occasional declarations, and Oman and Tunisia only once. As a result, the Middle East, described as the world's largest single market for conventional arms, does not figure prominently in any of the 12 arms registers released since its creation.
"Transparency in arms possession is a well-established objective in the arms limitation field, although it is not a disarmament measure per se," says Jayantha Dhanapala, a former UN undersecretary-general for disarmament affairs.
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