"Lord of War" extradited to the US

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101116/ap_on_re_as/as_thailand_us_arms_suspect

If any of you have seen the Nick Cage film "Lord of War", then you know some of the details about the life of prolific arms trafficker Victor Bout. He was nabbed in a sting in 2008 by Thai authorities working with the DEA in Bangkok, believing that he was negotiating an arms deal with the FARC of Colombia. Since then, the US and Russia have been lobbying the Thais for control of Bout. Bout was a former Soviet military officer, and when he went private after the fall of the USSR, Moscow still contracted with him for some under-the-table work and funneling arms to the black market. He is also rumored to be former KGB. So apart from the fact that he is a Russian citizen (and a professed "honest businessman"), they are concerned about what he may tell the US about their military-intelligence establishment and illicit arms distribution. The US may be interested in Bout for precisely that reason, not really to get a bad guy off the streets (since we cut deals with bad guys all the time in the Middle East). I guess after years of wrangling, we finally offered the Thais a big enough bribe/threat to let us have Bout and bring him to US trial for terrorism-related offenses.

Sure there is the whole cover story of the noble US global policeman wanting to bring a dangerous arms dealer to justice, a bad man who enabled warlords and dictators around the globe to commit unspeakable crimes on innocent victims, just to make a buck. He contributed to and profited from suffering and political instability. But it's not like getting rid of Bout since 2008 has made the world a safer place. The black market for guns is still alive and well, even in the US as we provide Mexican drug cartels with the bulk of their weapons. There are plenty of other arms dealers too, namely the permanent members of the UN Security Council, who do much larger volume sales of more deadly weapons than Bout could ever dream of. In 1990 dollars, the US has sold about $6B in arms each year, with the Russians not far behind at $5B/year. I am not sure if that amount includes military aid too (stuff we give away for free to friends).

In comparison, the UN estimates the global black market for arms trafficking at $250M yearly, which is less than 5% of America's "legitimate transactions" value. One can argue that the US is mostly selling to democracies, or at least people who share some of our values and hope to never have to use the weapons we sold them (but that's obviously not the case for Israel, Pakistan, and to some extent Colombia and Turkey). Arms smugglers are selling to people who are barred from buying arms openly because of their reputations and what the global community expects them to use the arms for. We are selling fancier, costlier merchandise of course, like warplanes and missile systems. So the cost of one F-16 equals thousands of used small arms that could wreak havoc on many victims in the hands of angry fighters. But Al Qaeda and Omar al-Bashir don't have gun factories. The small arms they obtain often originated in rich nations with strong military-industrial infrastructure, or poorer satellite states allied to global powers. So even if we didn't sell our guns (or the technology to manufacture them) directly to thugs, the people we sold them to eventually did via secondary transactions. So that is also irresponsible of arms dealing nations to not track and properly dispose of our weapons once they have outlived their initial purpose, or politics have changed. There are operational AK-47s used by the Taliban against NATO that are literally collector's items from the 1950s. The US doesn't face this problem because our guns break down much faster in harsh environments.

And lastly, I find it hilarious that this AP article failed to mention Bout's past dealings with the US military, and how he was actually an "ally" in our war on terror. Sure they noted his affiliation with bad men Gaddafi and Charles Taylor, but what about us? The "Lord of War" film alluded to this during the ending scene where a US general bailed Nick Cage's arms dealer character "Yuri" out of prison (sorry for the spoiler). During our 2003 invasion of Iraq, we needed to get a massive amount of military personnel and hardware airlifted into a nearly landlocked hostile country. Our military air cargo resources were insufficient, so we contracted with private carriers. But due to the high risk and insurance premiums, most firms declined to fly for us. But not Bout's air freight company of course. His fleet was plenty experienced smuggling in arms through war zones and avoiding detection. So he was earning millions from our defense contractors, or even directly from Pentagon accounts, while being a wanted criminal and on a US Treasury black list. He has even flown humanitarian aid flights for the UN. So I guess sometimes we have to go to bed with our enemy for the greater good.

Bout obviously has some relations with the Russian government that has afforded him legal protection and access to arms over the decades. He is a lubricant, so to speak, for their trade and foreign policy. But he is not the only one, as the world's top arms-dealing nations probably each have their own rosters of Viktor Bouts. During the Cold War, the US gave safe haven to many anti-communist terrorists who killed innocents in Cuba and Latin America, often at our behest and with our weapons/training. We obviously collaborated with arms traffickers during the Iran-Contra scandal (stinger missiles for hostages with drug money mixed in). Clearly it's not a bad thing that Bout is behind bars, but his market share will just be claimed by another. This isn't a matter of justice, but the projection of military and economic influence, as usual. The US-Russia rivalry changes with Bout out of the way, and possibly spilling his guts to the Feds about what he knows. Just don't be surprised if Putin spikes Bout's prison Salisbury steak with some radioisotopes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_dealing
http://www.havocscope.com/the-financial-value-of-the-black-market-in-arms-trafficking/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111799310

Fallout from the mid-terms

I definitely think Obama got a raw deal on Tuesday, but the Congressional Dems more deserved their fate. Obama deferred to special-interest-tainted Congress too much and didn't win the message war vs. the GOP (much of the time he didn't even participate, maybe wanting to show that he was above that). But as a young president who wanted to be transcendent and collaborative, maybe that's just the game plan he chose and got burned for it. Despite the media hype, Obama's presidency has not been extremely leftist. Sorry libertarians, but responsible gov'ts should get more involved during recessions. Maybe that can be problematic, but it's better than the alternative (see Japan's lost decade). Say Obama behaved like a "Blue Dog" and let the banks, local gov'ts, and auto go off a cliff towards a decade-long depression, laissez faire Hoover style. He and the Dems would have been slammed in the mid-terms anyway. So he might as well have tried to stimulate a recovery if he was going to lose no matter what. And according to NBER and Wall Street, he was mostly successful, though the pace is far from stellar of course.

Powerful conservatives in the media and business saw Obama's presidency as an affront to all they stand for (corruption) and hope to achieve (more profits), so they made his destruction their top priority. Nothing Obama could have done would have dissuaded them, even if he completely imitated Regan's leadership. Even now after their election victory, Senator McConnell said this week that denying Obama re-election in 2012 is the GOP's top priority. Soon-to-be Speaker Boehner is committed to repealing Obamacare. Not fixing the country's many problems, not helping Americans, not making the world safer, but defeating Obama and erasing his accomplishments. That's not conservatism, that's vendetta. To them, Obama may be a bigger enemy than Osama. These are the people controlling the purse strings in the House now. Good job, American voters.

I guess there is the argument that Obama spent too much effort and political capital on health care and not on job creation. Well our horrible health system is a drag on employers and the economy, so reform was a type of stimulus too. I don't think the final version of health care was that helpful for the economy, but it was better than the status quo. Then the GOP lambasted the Dems for the Recovery & Reinvestment Act, but many critical GOP congressmen were exposed for writing letters to gov't agencies asking for stimulus funds for their districts. Our infrastructure and social services are pathetic in many parts of the country, which also retards economic growth and social stability. Spending there is an INVESTMENT that will yield future returns. But I guess in the narrow-minded, short-sighted political culture, that's not persuasive enough.

Bottom line, the stimulus preserved or created some jobs, and extended unemployment benefits, which kept consumption from drying up and mitigated some of the social costs of mass unemployment. Many people still lost their jobs and income (while companies hoarded $1T is cash, but were hesitant to hire/invest even with record-low interest rates), but that is not Obama's fault. How much bang for the buck we got for the stimulus is another argument, but what was the GOP's alternative to the Obama/Pelosi agenda? Cut taxes, mostly for the rich and for corporations. We know that those type of tax cuts do not promote long term economic productivity. And Obama DID cut taxes for many Americans and small businesses, but he and Rahm didn't do a good enough job marketing that to the people. What about the bank bailouts? Remember that they started under Bush/Paulson, and few GOPs opposed them at the time. I'm not saying the bailouts were 100% good, but just using them as yet another example of GOP hypocrisy. Maybe all this back-and-forth between the Dems and GOP over how much the gov't is going to get involved in the economic recovery has contributed to the low corporate and consumer confidence in a recovery. It's a vicious cycle: if people don't think the economy is going to improve, they're not going to engage in the behaviors that are necessary for improvement. If Washington showed a unified front and brought all resources to bear to stimulate a recovery, then maybe companies would feel better about re-hiring. But what stood in the way of that? The threat of GOP Senate filibuster. And weren't they supposed to be the pro-business party?

Sports analogies in politics are overused, but maybe in this case it's fitting. A great coach on a bad team may lay the foundation for improvement, but he will still get fired after a couple losing seasons, even if he did a great job with the crummy hand he was dealt. Then his replacement gets all the credit for the improvements that he initiated (like Dungy turned around the Bucs but Gruden won the Super Bowl). Government policy doesn't usually immediately affect economic conditions, so any good or bad that Obama did may not even be known today or even by 2012. But in this era of 24-7 cable news, smart phones, and instant gratification, people are impatient for results. What can a president really do to turn around a $14T economy anyway, especially when 535 members of Congress all want their say, and almost half of them are committed to his failure? Voters seemed to be worried about the "size of government" and our deficit spending, but many conservatives didn't speak up during the Bush years and Medicare Part D (a bigger expansion of gov't health care than anything Obama has done). We had 4-9% GDP growth and were still running deficits under Bush, so what do you expect Obama to do with emaciated tax revenues and more people with their hands out? Debt is truly a problem for America (currently our deficit/GDP trends are moving towards Greek levels), but not our biggest problem. Plus much of our debt is due to our wars of choice and veteran's care, which no politician is prepared to cut. A household economy is not the same as a government's budget, so all those Tea Partiers using the one-liner "tighten our belts" cliches are just ignorant. There are plenty ways that the government can get more efficient, but it's not like the GOP has a great record of delivery on that either. So what is America really getting with a GOP House and an emasculated Obama?