Lord of War- The Arms Trade

There is a movie called Lord of War, starring Nicholas Cage. It's a good movie, I'd suggest you watch it. It follows a Ukrainian-American as he enters and then gains power in the business of selling weapons illegally. He and others like him make sure that wars run smoothly wherever wars can be fought. Smoothly in the sense that there won't be people who want to murder others going without the necessary assault rifle.

The problems with this kind of business are fairly obvious: the world doesn't actually want terrorists with AK-47s, RPGs, or whatever else they can get their hands on. This trade isn't likely to go away easily, since the US uses it to supply "freedom-fighters" when it wants to put pressure on a government it doesn't like, see Iran-Contra. Another problem is that black markets are notoriously hard to control, and this would require cooperation between governments on a global scale. Seeing how this doesn't even work with drugs, why would it work with guns? Still, a greater commitment to controlling arms would be a step in the right direction. There is a campaign calling governments, through the UN, to take greater measure to control the trade of arms called, appropriately, Control Arms, located at www.controlarms.org.

However, there is another, disturbing aspect to the arms trade, one that the Security Council would not like to admit its role in. And that is that the only reason there are weapons floating around to fall into the hand of militants is that they're produced in insanely huge quantities. After World War II the United States was faced with a dilemma. How was it going to maintain wartime levels of arms production, and protect this vital industry, without a war to fight? Well, at first it started giving away the surpluses it had to its allies. Its allies didn't really want more weaponry, though, as they wanted to produce their own.

So unable to sell to each other, America, France, Russia, and Britain started selling abroad. They sold so much that America and France are still the two largest producers of military goods and are still producing as if they were at war with someone. (Well, the US is at war with Iraq but it's not suffering from a lack of nukes or tanks, is it?) Russia produced so many of its highly effective AK-47 that it is truly the weapon of choice for militants and child soldiers worldwide. Britain has been replaced by China, since China soon realized this was a lucrative business indeed, and it had an impressive domestic market to start off with.

So thank you, Big Business. Thank you for fueling conflict around the globe, and thank you to the government for creating this monster of an industry to begin. As Matthew Good said it on Remembrance Day, "the very principles and freedoms that those individuals [i.e. soldiers] fought to protect have been either endangered or altogether lost by the sheer magnitude of our perpetual love affair with destruction." A love affair that has lined the pockets of the super-rich, created child soldiers, and aided conflict across the globe.