The United States of GDP

US states named after countries with similar GDP (GDP = consumption + investment + government spending + (exports – imports)). From Strange Maps (via Cynical-C).

An Ethiopian Civil War?

This is a terrific article from the Monday NY Times that I would have missed if it weren't for Truthout. Read. A cobbled summary:

In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.

It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip — and provides with prized intelligence. The two nations have been allies for years, but recently they have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid the region of a potential terrorist threat.

The Bush administration, particularly the military, considers Ethiopia its best bet in the volatile Horn — which, with Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, is fast becoming intensely violent, virulently anti-American and an incubator for terrorism...

“We’ve not only looked the other way but we’ve pushed them to intrude in other sovereign nations,” he added, referring to the satellite images and other strategic help the American military gave Ethiopia in December, when thousands of Ethiopian troops poured into Somalia and overthrew the Islamist leadership...

Its leaders, many whom were once rebels themselves, from a neglected patch of northern Ethiopia, are widely known as some of the savviest officials on the continent. They had promised to let some air into a very stultified political system during the national elections of 2005, which were billed as a milestone on the road to democracy.

Instead, they turned into Ethiopia’s version of Tiananmen Square. With the opposition poised to win a record number of seats in Parliament, the government cracked down brutally, opening fire on demonstrators, rounding up tens of thousands of opposition supporters and students and leveling charges of treason and even attempted to kill top opposition leaders, including the man elected mayor of Addis Ababa...

The armed resistance began in 1994, after the Ogaden National Liberation Front, then a political organization, broached the idea of splitting off from Ethiopia. The central government responded by imprisoning Ogadeni leaders, and according to academics and human rights groups, assassinating others. The Ogaden is part of the Somali National Regional State, one of nine ethnic-based states within Ethiopia’s unusual ethnic-based federal system. On paper, all states have the right to secede, if they follow the proper procedures. But it seemed that the government feared that if the Somalis broke away, so too would the Oromos, the Afar and many other ethnic groups pining for a country of their own.

The Ethiopian government calls the Ogaden rebels terrorists and says they are armed and trained by Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor and bitter enemy. One of the reasons Ethiopia decided to invade Somalia was to prevent the rebels from using it as a base.

The government blames them for a string of recent bombings and assassinations and says they often single out rival clan members. Ethiopian officials have been pressuring the State Department to add the Ogaden National Liberation Front to its list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. Until recently, American officials refused, saying the rebels had not threatened civilians or American interests.

“But after the oil field attack in April,” said one American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “we are reassessing that.”...

Many Ogaden villagers said that when they tried to bring up abuses with clan chiefs or local authorities, they were told it was better to keep quiet.

The rebels said thats was precisely why they attacked the Chinese oil field: to get publicity for their cause and the plight of their region (and to discourage foreign companies from exploiting local resources). According to them, they strike freely in the Ogaden all the time, ambushing military convoys and raiding police stations.

Mr. Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that, saying the rebels “will not confront Ethiopian military forces because they are not well trained.”

Expert or not, they are determined. They march for hours powered by a few handfuls of rice. They travel extremely light, carrying only their guns, two clips of bullets, a grenade and a tarp. They brag about how many Ethiopians they have killed, and every piece of their camouflage, they say, is pulled off dead soldiers. They joke about slaughtering Ethiopian troops the same way they slaughter goats.

Progressive Foreign Policy Points... or Attitudes

Max Sawicky, in the context of a discussion of the recent "Take Back America" (and a remark by Digby), outlines some basic considerations for progressives regarding US foreign policy.

1. There is no 'we.' Never was. Policy is of, by, and for elites.

2. Morality is not the policy. U.S. policy is always justified on humanitarian grounds, but never motivated by such considerations.

3. "Get a life." Genuine 'existential' threats to U.S. interests justifying the use of mass violence are rare. A nuclear Iran is not such a threat.

4. Let's look at the record. The practice of U.S. foreign policy (as for most great powers) is soaked with the blood of innocents. Blowback is the result, and the setting in which foreign policy should be evaluated.

5. It wasn't a mistake, it was on purpose. Characterizing Iraq or, say, Vietnam, as a 'mistake' glosses over the actual intents of policy-makers, as opposed to their public apologetics. Because the use of force is padded with phony justifications, the failure to achieve purported objectives is seen as the result of error, rather than the fact that such objectives were never seriously entertained to begin with.

6. Good stuff can happen. Positive outcomes from U.S. policy are possible and have been observed, but they are typically fortuitous, rather than the fruits of intelligent design.

I humbly suggest that failure to appreciate these points weakens our ability to forestall the next criminal war.

Unfortunately, I think - at least today - that this is basically right. Even non-governmental policy on the part of American-operated organizations addressing, say, international development issues is often formed by an eternal quest for funding which relies ultimately upon some of those same elites. This often undercuts any original humanitarian rationale, which remains as much a rhetorical gesture as it does any sort of problem-solving reality. Thus, because recipients are not stupid, even much of the best-intentioned policy can result in "blowback."

Labyrinths

Story here at BLDGBLOG.

Autograph Tree Fruit

Zzzzzzzzz

We here at Phronesisaical have been saying this over the life of this blog and beyond: it's a matter of legitimacy (do a keyword search of "legitimacy"). Now Princeton's John Ikenberry says it too and Harvard's Dani Rodrik thinks it's "the best thing I have read from a political scientist in a while." Sigh. Ikenberry (.pdf):

The most serious threat to American national security today is not a specific enemy but the erosion of the institutional foundations of the global order that the United States has commanded for half a century and through which it has pursued its interests and national security. America’s leadership position and authority within the global system is in serious crisis – and this puts American national security at risk. The grand strategy America needs to pursue in the years ahead is not one aimed at a particular threat but rather at restoring its role as the recognized and legitimate leader of the system – and rebuilding the institutions and partnerships upon which this leadership position is based. America’s global position is in crisis, but it is a crisis that is largely of its own making, and one that can be overcome in a way that leaves the United States in a stronger position to meet the diffuse, shifting, and uncertain threats of the 21st century.

The grand strategy I am proposing can be called “liberal order building.” It is essentially a 21st century version of the strategy that the United States pursued after World War II in the shadow of the Cold War – a strategy which produced the liberal hegemonic order that has provided the framework for the Western and global system ever since. This is a strategy in which the United States leads the way in the creation and operation of a loose rule-based international order. The United States provides public goods and solves global collection action problems. American “rule” is established through the provisioning of international rules and institutions and its willingness to operate within them. American power is put in the service of an agreed upon system of Western-oriented global governance. American power is made acceptable to the world because it is embedded in these agreed upon rules and institutions. The system itself leverages resources and fosters cooperation that makes the actual functioning of the order one that solves problems, creates stability, and allows democracy and capitalism to flourish. Liberal order building is America’s distinctive contribution to world politics – and it is a grand strategy that it should return to in the post-Bush era.

The Bush administration did not embrace the logic of liberal hegemonic rule or support the rules and institutions on which it is based – and America is now paying the price in an extraordinary decline in its authority, credibility, prestige, and the ready support of other states. Along the way, the Bush administration has made America less rather than more secure and its ruinous foreign policy is fast becoming an icon of grand strategic failure.

UPDATE (20 June):

I should clarify a bit. Legitimacy is the key issue for me here, not "liberal order building." The US has indeed represented some decent liberal values, ones that are hardly exclusive to the US. It has also engaged in some terrible actions that belie those values (Iraq being only the most recent). One reason other countries have, in spite of the horrible actions, continued to support the US is its economic influence and their economic dependency. Another reason is that the US could be counted on to stick up for - even when hypocritical, and even when highly selective - some notion of a decent international order representing widely shared values we might call "liberal." These two strands run throughout US history, especially during the 20th Century. But the current administration in my view has decided that international relations are about force and turning the screw of economic dependency alone. They've horribly misunderstood that, given alternatives, a country that disdains any international order than one that serves its own interests is one that is undeserving of support and ultimately will only receive cynical and opportunistic support. And when it comes to legitimacy, economic dependence is either too weak a factor to sustain the underlying values that constitute claims to legitimacy or so strong as to deceive political leaders into believing that they can get away with anything. For many in the world, the latter is what they view as American "liberal order building" where the rules are always written by America in America's favor. The Bush Administration has confirmed this view both implicitly and explicitly.

Climate Change Fairness?

I earlier summarized some of the main political and ethical points of dealing with climate change. One central political dispute is, of course, the participation of China and India and other large developing nations in any future climate change regime. The dispute centers on conflicting notions of fairness.

The US (and now the G-8) maintains that it is unfair for rapidly growing greenhouse gas emitters - China and India - not to be part of the international environmental regime. It worries, of course, about US economic standing vis-a-vis China in particular, but the more reasonable case is that China and India should not exacerbate the problem while other countries attempt to mitigate climate change (notwithstanding the fact that very little has indeed been done to date by the developed nations). China and India maintain, rightly, that the problem was created by countries such as the US and that developing nations should not have to pay economically for a problem created by countries that have reaped the economic benefits of pollution. In the earlier post, I put the matter as follows:

• that the US views ratification of Kyoto as not in its national interests. This position assumes that a) national interests are synonymous with economic interests; b) that there is no technological alternative for economic growth [also a value assumption] to increasing emissions; and c) that only national interests matter when it comes to climate change.

• that developing countries excluded from the first round of Kyoto should have been included, especially China and India, along with the developed Annex I countries...

...The basic argument from the developing nations is that, given the disproportional emissions on the part of the industrialized countries - which are a direct result of industrialization or modernization of their economies - to call for regulation on emissions from developing nations is to unfairly disadvantage their own industrialization or economic growth. In other words, it is a luxury to have modernized economically, while producing the majority of emissions, and now demand of economically developing nations that they reel in emissions (and thus, by implication, halt their economic growth or experiment with new technologies, something which the US in particular has been wont to do). This is, of course, not perceived to be in developing countries' economic interests by those countries.

Peter Singer in a recent essay summarizes the matter similarly:

China, India, and other developing nations, have a point – or rather, three points. First, if we apply the principle “You broke it, you fix it,” then the developed nations have to take responsibility for our “broken” atmosphere, which can no longer absorb more greenhouse gases without the world’s climate changing. Second, even if we wipe the slate clean and forget about who caused the problem, it remains true that the typical US resident is responsible for about six times more greenhouse gas emissions than the typical Chinese, and as much as 18 times more than the average Indian. Third, the richer nations are better able than less well-off nations to absorb the costs of fixing the problem without causing serious harm to their populations.

But it is also true that if China and India continue to increase their output of greenhouse gases, they will eventually undo all the good that would be achieved by deep emissions cuts in the industrialized nations. This year or next, China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter – on a national, rather than a per capita basis, of course. In 25 years, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, China’s emissions could be double those of the US, Europe, and Japan combined.

Now, most environmental issues involve questions of justice. When an environmental problem is created as a by-product of economic activity, not only are the costs usually externalized when evaluating the benefits of that economic activity, but the by-product has to go somewhere and ends up affecting someone. This is most clearly illustrated in environmental justice cases of toxic waste disposal - toxic waste generally tends to gravitate miraculously (since few claim it to be policy) to poor neighborhoods or poor countries.

In the case of climate change, everyone is potentially affected in multiple, complex ways from immediate effects of coastal or small-island flooding, for example, to long-term indirect economic losses, for example. But some - the industrialized nations - have contributed far more to the problem than developing nations, and some - poor nations, generally - will be more drastically affected than the industrialized nations. This puts the whole climate change regime framework on an unfair footing in the first place. Again, the issue is fairness or justice. Singer has a proposal:

...there is a solution that is both fair and practical:

• Establish the total amount of greenhouse gases that we can allow to be emitted without causing the earth’s average temperature to rise more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the point beyond which climate change could become extremely dangerous.
• Divide that total by the world’s population, thus calculating what each person’s share of the total is.
• Allocate to each country a greenhouse gas emissions quota equal to the country’s population, multiplied by the per person share.
• Finally, allow countries that need a higher quota to buy it from those that emit less than their quota.

The fairness of giving every person on earth an equal share of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our greenhouse gas emissions is difficult to deny. Why should anyone have a greater entitlement than others to use the earth’s atmosphere?

But, in addition to being fair, this scheme also has practical benefits. It would give developing nations a strong incentive to accept mandatory quotas, because if they can keep their per capita emissions low, they will have excess emissions rights to sell to the industrialized nations. The rich countries will benefit, too, because they will be able to choose their preferred mix of reducing emissions and buying up emissions rights from developing nations.

I think that this is perhaps the best we can do, at least in terms of an argument from fairness. But it requires the all-important factor that individual states commit to, first, acknowledging climate change as a serious problem that demands efforts from all countries and, second, accepting the climate change problem as currently grave enough to require a change in national policies today rather than tomorrow. Furthermore, it requires that individual states view the issue as a matter of fairness in the first place.

Now, here's the rub: I don't think there is enough pressure at this point for individual states, especially the United States, to take up the seriousness of the argument from fairness. Much of US federal policy is dictated by "national interest" (and, remember, this is almost always determined by particular economic interests), and the current administration is too beholden to a world-view that is so constricted it's a dot. There are already plenty of economic incentives to enter into climate change mitigation, but these seem to have made little dent in US federal policy or foreign policy, at least not relative to the gravity of the climate change problem. There are those in the US who look at climate change exclusively in terms of the damage caused to the national economy and geography and then suggest that the US can rather inexpensively adapt. That is the limit of the ethical claim for these people.

The key issue is that taking up a proposal like Singer's requires that we view the world in terms of more fully taking responsibility for our own actions, especially when those actions cause harm to others. It requires that we view non-citizens more fully in moral terms. But US policy - whether environmental, humanitarian or whatever - seems to me today to be concerned principally with US self-interest. Note how the US often demands of other countries things that it itself has no intention of doing (on, say, nuclear energy policy and proliferation). The ethics of self interest is the most primitive and unimaginative of ethical thinking. Much of our thinking about politics, economics, and so on remains at the normative level of self interest, whether individual or national. This is a cognitive framework for continual morally stunted policy.

In the Richest Country in the World...

The cash-strapped city of New Orleans is turning to foreign countries for help to rebuild as federal hurricane-recovery dollars remain slow to flow.

Kenya Smith, director of intergovernmental relations for Mayor Ray Nagin, said city leaders are talking with more than five countries. He wouldn't identify the countries, saying discussions were in the early stages. But he said the city is "very serious" about pursuing foreign help.

"Of course, we would love to have all the resources we need from federal and state partners, but we're comfortable now in having to be creative," Smith said. He did not know if the city would have to overcome any obstacles if it got firm pledges for aid, but "we want to make sure we're leaving no options unexplored."

For months Nagin has complained bureaucracy is choking the flow of much-needed federal aid dollars to New Orleans - slowing the city's recovery. As of June 8, the city said it had received just over half of the $320 million FEMA has obligated for rebuilding city infrastructure and emergency response-related costs. The city has estimated its damage at far more than that - at least $1 billion. And that doesn't include other improvements - such as raised neighborhoods - meant to help build the stronger city promoted by Nagin and his recovery director.

Discussions with foreign representatives have been occurring off and on since the storm, but Smith said the city became re-engaged after a news report in April that millions of dollars in aid offered by foreign countries after Hurricane Katrina went unaccepted.

It wasn't clear how much of the $854 million in aid originally offered remained on the table.

Helicopter Questions

Today is the first day of the Paris Air Show, always a wondrous occasion in which is celebrated humankind's gravitational léger de main. The IHT, of course, writes about the big business side of the show: Airbus vs. Boeing and how many contracts they rake in. But the organizers are celebrating 100 years of the helicopter this year. (Via Frogsmoke).

The first working helicopter was invented by Frenchman Paul Cornu, whose contraption is shown above. The feat of the bicycle-maker and engineer is all the more astounding because the contraption resembles less a bird, as regular aircraft do, and more an abstract notion of suspension. Many ideas for new technologies began through a continuity by conceptual analogy: the thorned branches of osage orange hedges and barbed wire, stones and hammers, birds and airplanes. Others came from new principles of physics, chemistry, engineering, such as the steam engine. But where did the helicopter come from? The Chinese had a flying top too made out of bamboo as early as the 5th Century. Leonardo designed a flying machine in the 15th Century based on his observations of bird flight.

Other European inventors designed prototype models to Cornu's version through the 19th Century. But, still, how does one move from the observation of bird flight to the rotary wing of the helicopter? Perhaps, rather, the source was the seeds of maple trees?

"If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose."

You must read this latest Seymour Hersh article in The New Yorker on General Taguba.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Monkey Fruit

Coke Wars

Eh?!?

From Chris Borgen at Opinio Juris:

I just stumbled across this article that was posted on an ecommerce website eight months ago about strategies for countering bad news from your foreign business operations (like accusations of complicity with torture and murder, etc.). The piece begins like this:

That a labor union at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Columbia was accusing the company of hiring paramilitary groups to torture and assassinate union leaders is just an interesting side note; the real story, as circulated by those in this ecommerce industry, is how Coke turned the tides on its accusers with targeted keyword public relations.

It then goes on to how to affect search results to affect the PR spin. Here's one peice of advice from the article:

1. Keep the story quiet in your home country. Look: Google News results for the term [killer coke] yield 57 links, not all of which actually refer to the lawsuit, even though the suit was filed in 2001. This is good because you don't want too many links to the list of bottling plant union leaders tortured, kidnapped and/or killed.

I guess it has been pretty effective, although Coke was criticized in another article for not being savvy enough in its search engine strategy to tamp down PR on the Colombian case.

In any case, as the original article summed it up:

The lesson here, then, obviously, is when you're beating back an image problem centering on paramilitary assassination accusations, it's important to have your search marketing campaign ducks in a row. The marketing gods at Coca-Cola should have known better.

Monkey Break

Courtesy of BibliOdyssey

More Tributes to Rorty

These are at Slate (picked up from Abbas at 3QD). I'm particularly fond of Stanley Fish's little list of favorite Rortyisms, each containing a world of argument.

A good way of teaching Rorty is simply to give students a baker's dozen of sentences and invite them to tease out the thought of the man who produced them. I have my own "top 10," and the list includes: "The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." "A conviction which can be justified to anyone is of little interest." "One would have to be very odd to change one's politics because one had become convinced, for example, that a coherence theory of truth was preferable to a correspondence theory." "What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French." "It seems to me that I am just as provisional and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Sturmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause."

UPDATE (19 June):

Also via 3QD is this brief essay by Todd Gitlin in the Boston Globe.

Photo: Getty / Steve Pyke

Shadow Surges

The Washington Post reports that contractors in Iraq (i.e., mercenaries) are engaged in their own "surge."

While the military has built up troops in an ongoing campaign to secure Baghdad, the security companies, out of public view, have been engaged in a parallel surge, boosting manpower, adding expensive armor and stepping up evasive action as attacks increase, the officials and company representatives said. One in seven supply convoys protected by private forces has come under attack this year, according to previously unreleased statistics; one security company reported nearly 300 "hostile actions" in the first four months.

The majority of the more than 100 security companies operate outside of Iraqi law, in part because of bureaucratic delays and corruption in the Iraqi government licensing process, according to U.S. officials. Blackwater USA, a prominent North Carolina firm that protects U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, and several other companies have not applied, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Blackwater said that it obtained a one-year license in 2005 but that shifting Iraqi government policy has impeded its attempts to renew.

The security industry's enormous growth has been facilitated by the U.S. military, which uses the 20,000 to 30,000 contractors to offset chronic troop shortages.

Meanwhile, Sunni insurgents are stepping up their "surge."

It is indicative of the U.S.'s inability to crush the insurgency that commanders are trying to find ways to split it. The military is urging Sunni nationalist groups to take up arms against their former al-Qaeda allies and has begun supplying some of them with weapons. In the immediate future, however, such efforts are unlikely to protect U.S. troops from an increasingly sophisticated and tenacious enemy — and may even put Americans at greater risk. A TIME investigation reveals that militant groups have responded to the U.S. surge with a big push of their own, unleashing a flurry of new or rarely used tactics and innovations designed to maximize the death toll. Their most potent weapons are the roadside bombs being fashioned by men like Abdallah, which now account for roughly 80% of U.S. deaths, up from 50% at the start of the year. "People are calling me all the time, asking for new ways to ..." Abdallah says, pressing down his right thumb on an imaginary remote control, and adds, "... Boom!"

The military's current security push in Baghdad, known to Iraqis as Operation Fard al-Qanoon, or Imposing Law, has elicited opposite responses from Iraq's two warring sects. Shi'ite militias like the Mahdi Army have decided to lie low; their leaders went underground or on vacation to Iran. Sunni groups, especially al-Qaeda's Iraqi wing, have girded for battle. Groups associated with the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization controlled by al-Qaeda, began to confer with one another and with other Sunni groups. "The first thing we realized is that we would need lots of IEDs and car bombs," says al-Nasr Salahdin's field commander, who was involved in some of the discussions. "Once the Americans were fully deployed, it would be hard to move bombs around, so we had to make them quickly and distribute them."

Some insurgent commanders fell back on tactics that worked before, such as moving their operations into areas where there are relatively few U.S. troops. Al-Qaeda elements driven out of Anbar province by the Marines and a coalition of local tribes began to cluster in Diyala. In recent weeks, bombers have struck even farther north, in Mosul, Kirkuk and long-peaceful Kurdistan. But most groups remained in Baghdad and even called in reinforcements. Many al-Qaeda fighters moved from Anbar to the capital, and the Islamic Army, the largest Iraqi insurgent group, called on its fighters to rally there for a cataclysmic showdown with U.S. and Iraqi troops. They began to attack new targets, like U.S. helicopters and important bridges that connect Baghdad to the rest of the country. "These were all new kinds of attacks, and there were so many of them, it was hard to keep track," says a Western official in Baghdad, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak with the media. "The message from al-Qaeda was, You do your surge, we'll do ours."

With everyone but the Mahdi Army surging (for the time being), what do you think happens?

Capitol Poo

Witnesses said they couldn’t believe that a single culprit could have produced the volume of poo present or that a person could have, well, deposited it the normal way without attracting attention. Several witnesses speculated it had been brought in from elsewhere.

Cursor Kite

Via NextNature, here's the "cursor kite."

Iguana Pop

I don't want to post the picture myself.

Kill Me Now

I like (like, in the sense of appreciate its tragicomedy) this headline from TomDispatch:

The Pentagon v. Peak Oil: How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them

The article by Michael Klare is worth a read, though the title says it all.

US Foreign Policy: Creating Civil Wars

A Tiny Revolution:

Thanks, Washington Post, for your eloquent descriptions of what never happened:

Under international pressure, Arafat agreed to name Abbas as a newly empowered prime minister in 2003...

When Arafat died at the end of 2004, Abbas won the elections to replace him as president of the Palestinian Authority. Despite deep Israeli misgivings, the United States encouraged Abbas to hold Palestinian legislative elections -- and Abbas invited Hamas to participate, believing he could beat them at the polls. But Hamas won...

Then, Washington organized a financial boycott of the government, in an effort to showcase Abbas as a moderate alternative in his role as president...The United States had just begun delivering nonlethal aid and training to security forces loyal to Abbas when Hamas decided to strike and seize Gaza.

Meanwhile, back in reality:

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas elections, last January [2006], Abrams greeted a group of Palestinian businessmen in his White House office with talk of a “hard coup” against the newly-elected Hamas government — the violent overthrow of their leadership with arms supplied by the United States. While the businessmen were shocked, Abrams was adamant — the U.S. had to support Fatah with guns, ammunition and training, so that they could fight Hamas for control of the Palestinian government...

And:

Egypt transfered a large quantity of arms and ammunition to PA security organizations in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, with Israel's approval...

The shipment included 2,000 AK-47 rifles, 20,000 magazines and two million rounds of ammunition.