Are wars intensified and expanded if all sides have ready access to guns, bombs, missiles and planes?

Do politics play the key role in wars, especially in today's underdeveloped nations? Or is economic greed by warring elites the major factor?

Are arms merchants becoming ever more oblivious to morality? Or were they always that way?

Merchant of Death, by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, raises all these questions.

Victor Bout, the "merchant of death," was a young entrepreneur who rose from the ashes of the disintegrating Soviet Union during the 1990s.

Today, during his travels, Bout stays at his "sumptuous homes" in Russia, Belgium, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

Bout has created a wide array of front airlines and business companies across the globe, including some corporations in Texas, Delaware and Florida.

As his profits skyrocketed, Bout established close relations with some of the world's worst dictators, including Charles Taylor in Liberia, Mubuto Sese Seko in Zaire and Paul Kagame in Rwanda.

Bout also has been close to several violent rebel leaders in Africa, including Jonas Savimbi in Angola.

And in recent years, Bout has been paid tens of millions of dollars for his services delivering weapons for Middle-East terrorist groups and for the current Bush administration.

A blooming career

During the last years of the Soviet regime, Bout was educated, perhaps under the KGB, but more likely under the GRU - a vast, even more secretive intelligence network that handled military intelligence and "for decades oversaw the flow of Russian arms to revolutionary movements and Communist clients in the Third World."

Bout learned nearly flawless English and French, as well as fluent Spanish. At 24, Bout began his arms delivery business. That was back in 1991.

At 41, Bout is the world's leading arms profiteer, Farah and Braun write, sitting atop the "world's multibillion-dollar contraband weapons trade, an underground commerce that is outpaced in illicit profits only by global narcotics sales."

The collapsed Soviet Union, its now-independent republics and other former Soviet bloc countries had huge stashes of often-abandoned aircraft, bombs and other weapons. Bout amassed much of his wealth by selling them.

By 1998, Bout was worth at least $5 million, before his business exploded from escalating arms sales to both sides in many conflicts.

Bout and his companies hauled in more than $50 million in profits from the extremist mullahs in Afghanistan. He also did business with the Bush administration and military contractors, possibly as much as $60 million. Bout flew arms into Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

But Bout has always been eager to market anything of value.

From the mid-1990s to just a few months before the 9-11 attacks, Bout supplied the Taliban terrorists with meat and fish, as well as weapons, flying them in on airplanes whose real ownership was usually obscured.

Those secret flights and covert arms deals were a turning point in the growth of Bout's empire, Farah and Braun write.

By the late 1990s, Bout had become "the preeminent weapons provider to Africa's dictators, warlords, rebel leaders and terrorists." Today, he owns the world's most powerful private air force.

Superpowers, big media

Yet Bout has been largely overlooked, or ignored, by superpowers on the U.N. Security Council and by reporters in the mainstream press.

In 2000, Peter Hain, a Labor Party politician and opponent of apartheid in South Africa, stirred public attention when he warned the British Parliament about dangers posed by Bout and others willing to routinely violate sanctions against arms-trading.

"Victor Bout is indeed the chief sanctions-buster, and is a merchant of death," testified Hain, then the Foreign Office's top minister of state for Africa.

Yet top government officials in the U.S., Farah and Braun point out, showed little interest in the vicious civil war in Sierra Leone, where rebel forces regularly amputated limbs from citizens, including little children, to establish their power.

By 1992, Bout already had a flourishing business delivering arms to both sides of the intensifying civil war there.

Are wars intensified and expanded if all sides have ready access to guns, bombs, missiles and planes?

Do politics play the key role in wars, especially in today's underdeveloped nations? Or is economic greed by warring elites the major factor?

Are arms merchants becoming ever more oblivious to morality? Or were they always that way?

Merchant of Death, by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, raises all these questions.

Victor Bout, the "merchant of death," was a young entrepreneur who rose from the ashes of the disintegrating Soviet Union during the 1990s.

Today, during his travels, Bout stays at his "sumptuous homes" in Russia, Belgium, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

Bout has created a wide array of front airlines and business companies across the globe, including some corporations in Texas, Delaware and Florida.

As his profits skyrocketed, Bout established close relations with some of the world's worst dictators, including Charles Taylor in Liberia, Mubuto Sese Seko in Zaire and Paul Kagame in Rwanda.

Bout also has been close to several violent rebel leaders in Africa, including Jonas Savimbi in Angola.

And in recent years, Bout has been paid tens of millions of dollars for his services delivering weapons for Middle-East terrorist groups and for the current Bush administration.

A blooming career

During the last years of the Soviet regime, Bout was educated, perhaps under the KGB, but more likely under the GRU - a vast, even more secretive intelligence network that handled military intelligence and "for decades oversaw the flow of Russian arms to revolutionary movements and Communist clients in the Third World."

Bout learned nearly flawless English and French, as well as fluent Spanish. At 24, Bout began his arms delivery business. That was back in 1991.

At 41, Bout is the world's leading arms profiteer, Farah and Braun write, sitting atop the "world's multibillion-dollar contraband weapons trade, an underground commerce that is outpaced in illicit profits only by global narcotics sales."

The collapsed Soviet Union, its now-independent republics and other former Soviet bloc countries had huge stashes of often-abandoned aircraft, bombs and other weapons. Bout amassed much of his wealth by selling them.

By 1998, Bout was worth at least $5 million, before his business exploded from escalating arms sales to both sides in many conflicts.

Bout and his companies hauled in more than $50 million in profits from the extremist mullahs in Afghanistan. He also did business with the Bush administration and military contractors, possibly as much as $60 million. Bout flew arms into Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

But Bout has always been eager to market anything of value.

From the mid-1990s to just a few months before the 9-11 attacks, Bout supplied the Taliban terrorists with meat and fish, as well as weapons, flying them in on airplanes whose real ownership was usually obscured.

Those secret flights and covert arms deals were a turning point in the growth of Bout's empire, Farah and Braun write.

By the late 1990s, Bout had become "the preeminent weapons provider to Africa's dictators, warlords, rebel leaders and terrorists." Today, he owns the world's most powerful private air force.

Superpowers, big media

Yet Bout has been largely overlooked, or ignored, by superpowers on the U.N. Security Council and by reporters in the mainstream press.

In 2000, Peter Hain, a Labor Party politician and opponent of apartheid in South Africa, stirred public attention when he warned the British Parliament about dangers posed by Bout and others willing to routinely violate sanctions against arms-trading.

"Victor Bout is indeed the chief sanctions-buster, and is a merchant of death," testified Hain, then the Foreign Office's top minister of state for Africa.

Yet top government officials in the U.S., Farah and Braun point out, showed little interest in the vicious civil war in Sierra Leone, where rebel forces regularly amputated limbs from citizens, including little children, to establish their power.

By 1992, Bout already had a flourishing business delivering arms to both sides of the intensifying civil war there.

During his administration, President Bill Clinton made efforts to coordinate efforts to combat drug lords, arms merchants and terrorists. But the Republican-led Congress was a "brick wall" blocking those efforts, according to Merchant of Death.

Bout routinely markets arms to all sides in any conflict, selling deadly weapons to the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in Afghanistan, rebel and government troops in Angola and several different sides in the seemingly-endless conflicts and wars in the Congo.

Bout sold arms to the right-wing Jonas Savimbi, who led UNITA against the Angolan government and who was backed by Ronald Reagan.

In 1985, Savimbi hosted a meeting in the jungle that included Nicaraguan contras and Afghan mujahideen. That get-together was organized by Jack Abramoff, a Republican operative who became a well-known lobbyist in recent years and who is now in federal prison on political corruption charges.

Bout collected many payments in cash.

But warlords and other regional tyrants - from the Congo and the Ivory Coast to Guinea and Afghanistan - paid Bout in diamonds, emeralds and coltan, a rare mineral used in cell phones and computers.

Bout uses a variety of names and aliases. And he buys and transports a wide variety of products, sometimes on return trips after completing arms deliveries.

For example, Bout discovered he could buy gladiolas in South Africa for $2 apiece, then sell them in Dubai for $100 each. He also bought chickens in South Africa for $1, then sold each one for $10 in Nigeria.

Bout's planes flew food supplies to Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville in the Congo) on humanitarian missions financed by the United Nations, then left loaded with weapons for unknown destinations, perhaps to Rwandan troops at a nearby battlefront.

Merchants of Death

More than 70 years ago, H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen published their classic work Merchants of Death that warned of massive efforts to keep the arms trade alive in the aftermath of World War I.

"Arms makers engineer 'war scares.' They excite governments and peoples to fear their neighbors and rivals, so that they may sell more armaments. This is an old practice worked often in Europe before the World War and still in use," they wrote in 1934.

That practice is obviously alive and well today, despite the efforts of some to stop it.

Some U.S. government agents - including National Security Council officials Lee Wolosky and Richard Clarke - stayed on their jobs after George W. Bush became president, hoping to track Bout down and arrest him.

But Bush's new national security team showed little or no interest in doing that.

"The Clinton administration's late-blooming interest in transnational threats had rapidly given way to the Bush administration's more traditional state-centric view of the world," Faran and Braun write.

And after Bush became president, Bout soon expanded his clients to include the U.S. government, American firms working for the U.S. Army and Marines, the U.S. Air Mobility Command and Federal Express.

Bout also began making air deliveries for Fluor, the U.S. petrochemical giant, and for Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, that won a huge no-bid contract for reconstruction work in Iraq.

"Bout had pulled off the ultimate metamorphosis," Farah and Braun conclude, "from hunted international criminal to the U.S. military's secret deliveryman. ...

"To the rest of the world, the American government appeared to be run by hypocrites and incompetents."

And all this happened, the authors show, despite the fact that Bout's network played a central role in supplying arms to the Talibs, and through them, to al-Qaida.

The U.S. government has looked the other way, allowing the world's leading "merchant of death" a free hand to expand massive illegal arms deals.

"In the end, international hypocrisy and the collapse of the post-Cold War order had allowed Bout's empire to thrive and sustain itself."

The United States, Great Britain, Belgium, South Africa and the United Nations, the authors suggest, all suffer from "superpower attention deficit disorder."

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 308 + xi pages. Hardcover, $25.95.

To contact staff writer Paul J. Nyden, use e-mail or call 348-5164.