Dispatches From The Edge

The Real "Merchants of Death"

By Conn Hallinan

September 21, 2010

Submitted to portside by the author

Accused Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout is a
centerpiece for the book "Merchant of Death" and the
model for the Hollywood movie "The Lord of War."
Washington apparently traded military hardware to the
Thais in order to get him extradited from a Bangkok
jail.

Major actor in the international arms trade, or a penny
ante operator who can't hold a candle to the real
"merchants of death"?--the U.S., Russia, Britain,
France, Italy, and immense corporations like Lockheed
Martin, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Dassault
Aviation, Finmeccanica, Boeing, Rosoboronexport, and
Northrop Grumman?

The global arms trade is a $60 billion yearly business,
of which the U.S. controls nearly 40 percent, and a
political and economic juggernaut that defends its turf
with the ferocity of a junkyard dog.

Bout is like the guy you buy a Saturday night special
from in a back alley. If you want something that will
flatten a village you need a Massive Ordinance
Penetrator from Boeing, or a General Atomics "Reaper"
drone armed with Lockheed Martin "Hellfire" missiles.

The charges against him create an interesting
juxtaposition.

The former Russian naval officer is accused of running
guns to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), the Taliban, and anti-government insurgents in
Somalia. The U.S. has sent some $5 billion in military
aid to the Colombian government to fight the FARC, has
spent over $300 billion trying to defeat the Taliban,
and props up the current Somali government.

There are arms dealers out there, but they are not
sitting in a Bangkok prison. The 10 biggest arms
exporters are--in order--the United States, Russia,
Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, China,
Israel, the Netherlands, and Italy.  Sweden and
Switzerland are close behind. This order shifts from
year to year, but one thing never changes: the U.S. is
always number one.

According to the Congressional Research Service, due to
the current economic downturn, world arms sales dipped
8.5 percent in 2009. But "dipped" is a relative term.
The price tag was still  $57.5 billion, of which the
U.S.'s 39 percent share came to $22.6 billion. Russia
was second at $10.4, and France third with $7.4 billion
in sales. Other countries split the rest.

Most of the trade--$45.1 billion--focuses on developing
nations. Of the top seven arms purchasers in 2008, four
of them--India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Algeria--are
countries that can ill afford to put money into weapons
systems.

Brazil, Venezuela, Egypt, and Vietnam were also among
the bigger arms buyers in 2009, and Iraq is planning to
purchase $13 billion in U.S. weaponry. All are
countries struggling with poverty.

The U.S. overwhelmingly dominates arms sales to the
developing world. In 2008 it cornered 68.4 percent of
such sales, and 45.1 percent in 2009. (10) It is
currently negotiating a $60 billion arms sale to Saudi
Arabia that will probably cost $120 billion when parts
and maintenance is added in.

Arms sales many times parallel the foreign policy of
the suppliers. When the U.S. sells arms to Egypt,
Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab
Emirates, Colombia, Japan, and South Korea, it is
arming its allies against regional antagonists, like
Iran, Syria, China and Venezuela. Arms sales to places
like Yemen and Somalia support U.S. allies caught up in
civil wars.

But the arms trade is also an enormously profitable
enterprise for the companies involved, and any effort
to curb that trade brings on an assault of lobbyists
and political action committees.  Lockheed Martin, the
world's largest arms producer, spent over $20 million
to lobby Congress in 2009.

The companies have carefully spread their operations to
scores of states, so that when an effort is made to
cutback or eliminate certain weapons, some local
congress member will rise to defend jobs in his or her
district.

When a move was made to cut the B-2 stealth bomber--an
almost useless aircraft that cost $2.1 billion
apiece--its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, mobilized
383 congressional districts in 46 states to
successfully save the plane.

In reality, military spending doesn't create jobs, it
kills them. According to a study by the Center for
Economic and Political Research, military spending
actually has a negative impact on economic growth. A
one percent increase in defense spending--U.S. Defense
Secretary Robert Gates' current proposal--would, over 20
years, reduce GDP by 0.6 percent. That translates into
approximately 700,000 jobs, with construction and
manufacturing particularly hard hit.

While Gates talks about "efficiencies," he is not
proposing to cut the military budget, just trim things
like health care and bureaucracy and shift those
savings to support troops in the field.

"The long-term impact of our increased defense spending
will be a reduction in GDP of 1.8 percent," says
economist Dean Baker. "The projected job loss from this
increase in defense spending would be close to two
million [jobs]."

The result of PACs and lobbing efforts by the arms
companies is not only continued spending, but also
expensive weapons systems that don't work or are simply
unneeded. The U.S. currently has 11 aircraft carriers
in spite of the fact that no other nation possesses
even one carrier that can match the huge $6.2 billion
Nimitz-class vessels in the U.S. fleet.

Lockheed Martin's taxpayer funded F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter--at $184 million apiece, the most expensive
weapons system ever built--is, according to arms
analysts Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler, an
overweight, underpowered turkey that is so complex it
will likely spend most of its time in the repair shop.
Lockheed Martin is already taking orders from foreign
buyers.

Many companies have responded to the recession by
buying up enterprises specializing in defense
electronics, cyber security, and the hottest new thing:
killer robots.

Countries all over the world are clamoring to buy
General Atomics' Predators and Reapers, BAE's Tiranis,
and Israel's Harpy and Heron, the latter a mega beast
the size of a commercial airliner and capable of
carrying a wide range of weapons. Predators runs $4.5
million apiece and the larger, more muscular Reaper,
$10.5.

The international arms trade will not even notice if
Viktor Bout ends up behind bars. Men like Bout are
shadowy actors that play on the margins. To have a real
impact on the global arms enterprise will require
confronting powerful corporations, with their lobbies
and their PACs, as well as an immense military
establishment.

But according to Frida Berrigan of the Arms and
Security Project of the New American Foundation, the
Obama Administration is "investigating" how to make the
selling of military technology easier.

A number of NGOs, including Amnesty International, the
International Network on Small Arms, and Oxfam, are
working on an arms trade treaty that would try to keep
weapons out of the hands of human rights abusers.

But "human rights abusers" is a slippery term. For the
U.S., Venezuela is a human rights abuser and can't buy
U.S. arms, while Honduras and Colombia are okay, even
though regimes in both of the latter countries have
been accused of working with death squads.  The most
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez can be accused of is a
certain love of bombast and strong opposition to
Washington's policies in the region.

A United Nations conference on drawing up an arms trade
treaty is set for 2012, although there have been no
serious negotiations to date. But such a treaty will
need to do more than just get a handle on some of the
more odious practices currently underway, it most
restrict and then move toward an eventual ban on the
trade itself.

_____________________________________________

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