Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade.

• Author: Wasserman, Harvey

Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade By John Tirman Free Press. 310 pages. $25.00

After George Bush's 1991 triumph in Iraq, U.S. weapons merchants faced a sobering reality. As John Tirman, in his fine Spoils of War, quotes an American arms dealer: "Desert Storm was a good news/bad news situation. The good news, besides the amazingly low [American] casualty rate, was that we didn't lose much equipment. But for defense contractors that's bad news because there's very little inventory to replace. It won't mean much new business."

So the war was too short. The four-day rout of the Iraqi army consumed too little of the American arsenal. The carnage that weapons sellers hoped would bring them billions in reorders had simply failed to deplete the U.S. inventory of tanks and helicopters.

Think, then, of how the arms dealers must have greeted the February uprising at Ohio State University in Columbus that helped cancel Desert Storm's intended sequel. The shouts of protest shaking the rafters of that basketball arena meant millions in unsold shells, tanks left in their stalls, helicopters uncrashed and unreplenished.

For America's arms dealers, peace can be supremely expensive. That's the devastating theme of Tirman's Spoils of War, which shows how U.S. arms sales drive our foreign policy.

A former Time magazine reporter, Tirman has led the Winston Foundation for World Peace for the last ten years. He proves a savvy commentator on both belt-way politics and the need to convert the national economy to peacetime production.

Tirman structures his book around U.S. policy in Turkey, our most pivotal near-Eastern client state. He focuses on the Connecticut helicopter manufacturers that supply Turkey's arsenals and on the politicians in Washington, particularly Senator Christopher Dodd (Democrat of Connecticut), who keep the skids greased with taxpayer money.

As Tirman illustrates when he describes the "liberal" Senator Dodd, the jobs that come from selling the tools of war exert a tremendous influence on our foreign policy decisions.

At the end of the Cold War, there was talk of converting to a peacetime economy. But, says Tirman, "very few major contractors bought into anything resembling conversion."

Some feared their credibility might be compromised if they took on peace work. Others were simply too big and dumb to diversify. Many of them went down.

"Had the big players decided to utilize their vast technology base more inventively,"...