BUSINESS WEEK– The U.S. government approved $40 billion in worldwide private arms sales in 2009, including more than $7 billion to Mideast and North African nations that are struggling with political upheaval, the State Department reported.

From 2008 to 2009, the U.S. authorized increasing sales of military shipments to the now-toppled Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak and the embattled kingdom of Bahrain. But the U.S. reduced its defense sales approvals in 2009 to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libyan government, which is now under a blanket weapons ban imposed last month by the Obama administration.

The $40 billion figure during the first year of the Obama administration reflects a rise in total approved arms sales over the final year of the Bush administration in 2008, when the State Department licensed $34.2 billion.

The latest figures describe sales of military hardware from missile systems to bullets that the State Department authorizes from private U.S. defense companies to other countries. The figures do not include direct U.S. military aid to other nations, providing a limited snapshot of the ebb and flow of American arms abroad. The figures also detail only proposed sales — not actual shipments.

The new numbers issued in a report from State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls indicate that international sales sought by U.S. defense firms have surged in the last two years after holding steady for most of the 2000s in the range of $20 billion. And the report’s details show the willingness of the Obama administration, like preceding White Houses, to sometimes provide military and crowd-control weaponry to regimes with little popular support.