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The Shadow World: Inside The Global Arms Trade (2011)

by Andrew Feinstein(Favorite Author)

3.76 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0374208387 (ISBN13: 9780374208387)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: This is a formidable account of the global arms trade. It’s not a pretty picture. It’s laden with corruption and shoddy characters making millions of dollars. Hardly any of them pose the moral question: “why am I doing this”? What is the purpose of all these deals for faster jets and small arms that number in the hundreds of thousands? The money and the killing fields are ever-expanding.It’s all outlined, in sometimes excruciating detail, in Andrew Feinstein’s book. The United States is selling, by the dozens, high-tech jets to Saudi Arabia – the richest authoritarian country on the planet. Saddam died a few years ago – what do they need so many for? It’s almost like these immoral states (Saudi Arabia, Libya) are collectors – lining up their tanks, plan... morees, artillery… for an impressive show.The sordidness of all these transaction sales are given in detail; for instance – purportedly Poland sells weapons to Latvia, some end up there and the rest are re-routed to Somalia. And this is a simple outline. As Mr. Feinstein well illustrates any weapons deal implicates bribes in the millions of dollars – it’s the standard protocol.I worked for a medium-sized company and after SOX auditing was introduced, any code changes to the accounting systems – no matter how insignificant – had to be signed off by managers, accountants… I learnt from this book that the Pentagon, which deals in billions of dollars, has not been audited for twenty years! The U.S. has a parallel government running within Congress – the Pentagon - and the private companies supplying armaments that are not accountable to the taxpayer. Billions of dollars are spent and wasted in this self-perpetuating cycle which is corroding democracy in the U.S. – and by extension the rest of the world. Abundant examples are provided by Mr. Feinstein of the armaments industry corrupting government decisions. It was also interesting to read that whereas the ratio of contractors to U.S. military personnel in the Second World War was 1:7 (one contractor to seven soldiers) and in Vietnam 1:6; there are now in Iraq/Afghanistan 1.18 contractors per U.S. soldier! The payment of these contracting companies is constantly increasing and their actions unaccountable.This is an engrossing book. I did find that Mr. Feinstein overrates the role of the U.S. and Charlie Wilson in the downfall of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It was Pakistan’s I.S.I. and the Saudi’s who provided men and money to defeat the Soviet forces. The I.S.I. controlled all the movement of men and supplies (weapons) across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I would also have liked to learn more about land-mines which (as far as I know) can be active for several years.Mr. Feinstein describes how Africa has become decimated by arms dealers. The less government (or the more a state borders on failing) the more these dealers can run amuck. There is no morality in selling arms to Africa. The deals can be barter for diamonds or oil or minerals (like coltan in the Congo). This book provides us a horrendous view of this amoral world.
review 2: quite a broad discussion of the characters in the illicit arms trade - gets a bit repetitive reading the same stories about kickbacks, endless namedropping, payment schemes... the descriptions of deal structures are also quite layman and some deal diagrams look a bit simplistic - so the book doesn't really dig deep into how exactly some of the transactions worked, why certain jurisdictions were chosen etc etc.but generally, the schemes are interesting and the extensive discussion on BAE and the Al Yanamama deal with Saudis is very revealing - if for the shock value of how recently these events took place. The latest UK anti-bribery laws seem much less ridiculous in this light less

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