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Permanent
War, Perpetual Profiteering
“Ex”-KGB
Arms Merchant Viktor Bout and Dick Cheney's Halliburton Corporation
have set up operations in Dubai, UAE; these “Lords of
War” are now poised to capitalize on anticipated conflicts
in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
By William Norman Grigg
 “Enjoy
it.”
“ What?”
“ This.... Tell me I'm everything you despise. That I'm the personification
of evil. That I'm responsible for the breakdown of the fabric
of society and world order. I'm a one-man genocide. Say everything
you want to say to me now. Because you don't have long.”
The cocky defiance displayed by international arms dealer Yuri
Orlov seemed to be misplaced.
Arrested
and awaiting his arraignment on numerous charges, Orlov was
in the custody of his nemesis, the idealistic Interpol Agent
Jack Valentine. The investigator had pursued Orlov across several
continents, generally following the trail of corpses left by
his clients – chiefly petty dictators in squalid African
countries that were more or less constantly at war for no defensible
reason.
Orlov's serene confidence was a product of something he knew
that Valentine didn't: They worked for the same people, who had
much more use for a man who supplies weapons to terrorists and
dictators than someone who seeks to stop that trade. Orlov gently
broke the news to Valentine that within five minutes his superiors
would get a phone call ordering his release.
“The reason I'll be released is the same reason you think
I'll be convicted,” he told Valentine earnestly. “I
do rub shoulders with some of the most vile, sadistic men calling
themselves leaders today. But some of these men are the enemies
of your enemies. And while the biggest arms dealer in the world
is your boss - the President of the United States, who ships
more merchandise in a day than I do in a year - sometimes it's
embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns. Sometimes
he needs a freelancer like me to supply forces he can't be seen
supplying. So. You call me evil, but unfortunately for you, I'm
a necessary evil.”
Yuri
Orlov, the Ukrainian-American arms dealer played by Nicholas
Gage
in the 2005 film Lord of War, is a broadly drawn fictional
analogue to “ex”-KGB arms trafficker Viktor Bout.
In 1993, after the Cold War ended, Bout assembled a small fleet
of Soviet military aircraft and went into business ferrying
weapons to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and African dictators.
According to the State Department, Bout currently commands
a fleet of 60 cargo planes staffed by 300 pilots and employees,
and operates a shifting roster of companies used for providing
arms – such as assault rifles, ammunition, missile launchers
and helicopter gunships -- to clients embroiled in various
conflicts. At
least some of his business involved shipping cyanide and other
toxic chemicals to Afghanistan for use in
experiments conducted by al-Qaeda.
Bout
has at least a half-dozen passports and several aliases, and
he's
been the subject of various international warrants,
investigations, and financial sanctions (his US assets have been
frozen by the Treasury Department). He is shrouded in a malevolent
mystique worthy of a James Bond villain. It's likely that the
truth about Bout is that he's much more like Nicholas Gage's
Yuri Orlov, a glorified errand boy on the payroll of the real “Lords
of War” -- people like the ambulatory wad of unfiltered
evil called Dick Cheney.
In
early March we learned that Halliburton is moving its corprorate
headquarters to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, which has
served as Bout's base of operations since 1997. Roughly a year
ago, I
published a piece in the now-defunct Birch Blog suggesting
that there was a Bout-related subtext to the abortive deal to
turn US port security over to DP Ports World, which is also based
in Dubai.
 Conveniently
for both Halliburton – Cheney's once-and-future
corporate home -- and Bout's ventures, the UAE does not permit
extradition, and has an almost unlimited tolerance for graft
and corruption.
“Halliburton
will be moving to a `comfort zone' when it relocates its headquarters
to Dubai, a place where there are
no taxes to pay and where corruption, while not a virtue, is
not a vice,” observed Youssef Ibrahim in March
15 New York Sun. The deal “puts the megacompany close
to its favored clients. In the past few years, Halliburton's
business has shifted to places like Kuwait, Russia, Libya, Australia,
Vietnam, and west and central Africa, places where business practices
are more elastic than in America” (which, in this era of
rampant, taxpayer-underwritten crony capitalism, is saying quite
a bit).
While
working as a politically connected rainmaker for Halliburton
in the
mid-1990s, Dick Cheney “helped Halliburton establish
its close ties to the oil-rich family governments of Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and others,” concludes
Ibrahim. “And, once
Halliburton is no longer subject to American laws, there are
many billions to be made in Iran, which needs American expertise
to boost its oil production.”
There are additional billions to be made on the wars that are
planned for the region, as well – and the established
relationship between Halliburton and Bout suggests that this
might be the most potent selling point for the move to Dubai.
In
late 2005, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and several other
news
outlets reported that air cargo operators working as fronts
for Bout were hired to supply US troops in Iraq; one of Bout's
very lucrative taxpayer-underwritten subcontracting deals was
with Kellogg, Brown & Root, at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton.
(It has since been spun off as a separate entity called KBR.)
The
US media was beaten to this story by Le Monde, which reported
on May
14, 2004 that Bout's planes, “flying under the name
of [the] airline company British Gulf, [which is] likely to disappear
as fast as it was created, are assuring `transport of materiel'
for the American army in Iraq.”
Washington
turned to Bout's air carriers because “its
crews are `accustomed to land in any kind of war zone without
having a fit. And if one of their planes is shot down, there's
no risk of American pilots' bodies being dragged through the
streets.'” A
Belgian investigator reported that Bout
had offered similar services to Washington in Afghanistan by
ferrying arms to the Northern Alliance.
Despite
the fact that the UN has “banned” Bout from
international travel, the world body made use of his air fleet
to transport blue berets into conflicts in Africa and East Timor.
As I pointed out a year ago, this is an old story: The poison
and the antidote that are manufactured in the same factory; the
fireman who moonlights as an arsonist; the arms merchant who
supplies both sides in a conflict.
Bout
profits handsomely from sowing wars; Halliburton, which specializes
in “reconstruction,” profits from the
harvest phase of those demonic undertakings. The fact that Bout
and Halliburton have converged in Dubai suggests that they plan
to be working opposite ends of Middle Eastern killing fields
for years or decades to come.
Mr.
Grigg is editor-at-large for The
Right Source media enterprises.
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