Feinstein reminds us briefly that the victims of the arms trade and the violence it enables are not just soldiers, but also civilians in large numbers — hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same or more in Angola’s civil war, Darfur and elsewhere. Contemporary warfare is more than ever about killing the innocent.
Regaling the reader with these misdeeds and horrid consequences, “The Shadow World” becomes a tirade, one that goes down in the weeds of dozens of deals. Feinstein has the problem that all serious nonfiction writers face, making complex and at times tedious issues understandable and compelling. For the most part, he succeeds by conveying them as stories. But it does require some work from the reader, who must navigate a jungle of actors and acronyms to follow these tales. This may be inevitable for such a comprehensive treatment of the arms trade, possibly the most complete account that has ever been written.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - ‘The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade’ by Andrew Feinstein
Feinstein makes a convincing argument that, particularly in Africa, the supply of weaponry made conflicts more lethal. It’s a powerful and sad case. Those who dismiss the notion that the arms trade is a cause of violence often point to the use of machetes in Rwanda as their example. Feinstein counters, “The popularized images of the Rwandan genocide suggest a primal orgy of slaughter, a frenzy of bloodlust and carnage. The exact opposite, however, was true. The genocide was meticulously organized in order to kill as many people as efficiently as possible. The mountains of weapons that had been imported into the country were crucial to achieving this aim” — weapons such as grenades and firearms that were used “to achieve the highest kill-rate possible.”
What he does less well is provide some hope in this stew of corruption and mayhem. A rather sophisticated if small community of experts, NGO activists and a few sympathetic governments has taken up the cause of limiting arms exports, and they met with some success with the 1997 treaty to ban land mines, a global pact (but never signed by the United States). But that was more than a decade ago, and these activists haven’t regained the traction needed to go up against the major powers — states and corporations — which cannot see past the bottom line. It may be that there’s less violence than once beset the world, as Steven Pinker argues in his new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” but there’s still plenty of carnage to go around — good news for the arms makers, tragic news for everyone else.
John Tirman
is author of “
The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars
” and is executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.
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