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Merchant of Death

By Larry Johnson on July 27, 2007 at 5:51 PM in Current Affairs

by
Larry C Johnson

Doug Farah Book

Need some beach reading? Hell, even if you aren’t taking a vacation take some time and get yourself a copy of Doug Farah’s and Stephen Braun’s latest Merchant of Death, which marks another stellar effort in Farah’s oeurve on terrorists and general bad guys. I don’t know Braun but Doug is an old friend. I first became aware of his work when I was at the CIA working on the Contra war and Doug was slogging around the jungles of Central America.

Doug and Stephen get you up close and personal with one of the world’s most notorious arms merchants, Viktor Bout. Farah and Braun are getting some sincere praise for their effort. Check out the comments of Risen and Isikoff:

In Merchant of Death, two of America’s finest reporters have performed a major public service, turning over the right rocks that reveal the brutal international arms business at the dawn of the 21st Century. In Viktor Bout, they have given us a new Lord of War, a man who knows no side but his own, and who has a knack for turning up in every war zone just in time to turn a profit. As Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun uncover and document his troubling role in the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror, his ties to Washington almost seem inevitable.
James Risen, author of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

# Viktor Bout is like Osama bin Laden: a major target of U.S. intelligence officials who time and again gets away. Farah and Braun have skillfully documented how this notorious arms dealer has stoked violence around the world and thwarted international sanctions. Even more appalling, they show how Bout ended up getting millions of dollars in U.S. government money to assist the war in Iraq. A truly impressive piece of investigative reporting.
Michael Isikoff, coauthor of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War

Check it out.

  • CK

    If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks; the best available bet is that it is a duck. V. Bout American asset.
    Next.

  • Mr.Murder
  • mudkitty

    Arms and oil…follow the money.

    International Arms Dealing? Is there a license for that?

  • CK

    Yes there is. But you cannot have one.

  • Jerome

    There is a reason Osama and Bout stay “uncaught”.

    How do you fight a fifty year war on terror if you kill all the leaders right off the bat. Why do you think Arafat was allowed to live and rule as a terrorist until he became old and died of natural causes.

  • Shirin

    Jerome, you might be right in your basic premise, but your comment about `Arafat is not factual. `Arafat was not involved in terrorism for the last several decades of his life, despite all the propaganda to the contrary. I was never a fan of his, but it is still important to be factual.

    • Jerome

      heh

    • Jerome

      If that is what you want to believe. I am sure you have chapter and verse. I’ll clarify and say, ‘before, the PLO was born. That will cover most of My life.

  • mudkitty

    How does one apply for a license to deal in arms, and I ain’t talkin ’bout the local gun shop?

  • Leslie

    Mudkitty,
    Guess we’ll have to read the book to find out how illicit arms dealers make themselves useful [get licenses].

  • Cee

    I think Doug’s book Blood From Stones is a must read as well.

    Larry,

    Why do we still use the services of Bout? Also, was the movie Lord of War about him?

  • mudkitty

    I want a license to deal arms. I’ll pass a bg check. I want one.

  • mudkitty

    So where’s my license?

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  • Patrick Henry

    Good to see you Back Taters..

    Missed your “Music”

  • taters

    Thanks Patrick, it’s great to be home.

  • taters

    Thanks Larry, I look forward to reading it. I’m catching up here at NQ. We celebrated BB King’s 82nd birthday on the last date, Sunday.

    From July 1914
    excerpted from Eyewitness To Hitory, edited by John Carey, Avon Books 1997, pgs 444 – 445 Harvard Press

    From The Vulture (an account of armaments dealer, Sir Basil Zaharoff by Osbert Sitwell)
    [...] This armament monger exactly resembled a vulture, and it is no good pretending, in order to avoid the obvious parallel,that he did not. To some it may cause surprise that a man who traded on weapons of death and the propects of war,and grew fat bodied on the result of them, should have resembled the scaly-necked bird; but whether or or no it seem strange, depends on one’s view of the world, and of the immense and startling range of analogy, simile and and image than it offers. There in any case, the likeness was, for all to behold: the beaky face, the hooded eye, the wrinkled neck, the full body, the impression of physical power and of the capacity to wait, the somber alertness[...]

    Here’s something else on the “mystery man of Europe”

    [...] But Zaharoff played a leading, if not the leading, role in that strange world comedy of the arms makers leading the double life of chauvinists and internationalists. They gave us the spectacle of Boers mowing down English regiments with Vickers’ pom-poms, Prussian surgeons picking out of Prussian wounded Austrian shrapnel fired by Krupp’s cannon, French poilus massacred by shot poured out of guns made in Le Creusot, English Tommies killed by weapons produced by Armstrong and Vickers, and American ships sent to the bottom by U-boats built on models supplied by American submarine builders. Zaharoff was the master of what one biographer has called the “principle of incitement,”under which war scares were managed, enemies created for nations,airplanes sold to one nation and antiaircraft guns to her neighbors, submarines to one and destroyers to another. He did what the cigarette people did, what the liquor industry, the beauty industry did — created a demand for his merchandise. The armament industry became a game of international politics, the arms salesman a diplomatic provocateur, the munitions magnates of all nations partners in cartels, combines, consolidations; exchanging plans, secrets, patents. He was the greatest of all the salesmen of death, and, as one commentator has observed, if you would see his monument, look about you at the military graveyards of Europe. [...]

    From The Merchant of Death: Basil Zaharoff
    By John T. Flynn
    [From Men of Wealth, pages 337–372.]

    http://www.mises.org/story/2687

    http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/merchants/merchant_08.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Zaharoff

    Readers here know that it was common for birds of carrion to wait close by when a battle was pending, in anticipation for their grisly spoils. And for those that appreciate first hand accounts, I think you would thoroughly enjoy Eyewitness to History.

    http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/

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