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/
http://www.havocscope.com/the-
http://www.npr.org/templates/
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