Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2011) — Book Review

27 September 2015

Where “shadow” is actually the “real” world

Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) is a persuasive, if — probably unavoidably — disorganized presentation regarding the Military Industrial Complex’s corruption of virtually all government. The book’s selling point over others about the same subject is that it spans more time and geography.

First, the book’s understandable flaw — disorganization

Phenomena that are intentionally kept secret and duplicitous are, most would probably agree, impossible to put together in A-B-C-D storytelling fashion. Since Feinstein’s vision is all-embracing, The Shadow World is arguably marred by too much sprawling detail, too weakly linked together for attention-keeping intelligibility.

This trait results in revisiting the same arms deals, but from different perspectives across the book’s 536 (non-note) pages. It also means that individual “protagonists” are not treated (even with regard to themselves) in chronological order, which frequently leads to mild confusion.

The author’s evident humility contributes to the book’s disorganization

Ordinarily, one would expect an author to list his credentials, or the origin of his or her interest in the written about topic, somewhere toward the beginning of the book. Feinstein does not.

It is only in Chapter 9 — more than 175 pages into the book — that we learn that he was a member of the South African government, who had fought to reveal and oppose arms trade corruption in his own country:

I experienced BAE’s [see here] pernicious impact on developing countries at first hand.

I was elected an ANC Member of Parliament.

[As] Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela, non-racism was replaced by a less inclusive Africanism as sense of national interest superseded by the needs of the party. Open accountability gave way to a closing of the ranks in which loyalty to the party and its leader became the crucial political currency.

At the time I was the ranking ANC member on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, a body which vigorously and in a non-partisan manner reviewed government spending and instigated action against the misappropriation of public funds.

It was also the role that would bring me into direct contact with the arms trade for the first time. With the end of apartheid the ANC had undertaken to reduce spending on the military in favour of the country’s dire socio-economic needs. So it came as something of a surprise when the government announced a massive purchase of military equipment in 1999. Estimated to cost roughly $3bn at the time — although this disguised the true cost of the deal by at least 250 per cent — it secured South Africa a range of military hardware, including Hawk and Gripen jets from BAE and Saab, submarines and frigates from Germany, and helicopters from Italy.

After countless overt and covert assignations and the receipt of thousands of pages of evidence from the Auditor General and intrepid journalists, a close colleague and I pieced together a frightening tale of corruption and deceit, with BAE the main villain of the piece.

We established that, at the time he was claiming the government had insufficient resources to provide life-saving medication to the millions of South Africans living with Aids, Thabo Mbeki had entered into contracts for arms that by their conclusion in 2018 will have cost the country over $6bn. This, despite the reality that South Africa faced no external threat.

In my view, beginning The Shadow World with that information would have made more sense than delaying it so long.

Until I got to Chapter 9, I had wondered how Feinstein knew what he knew and how he had access to so many influential people. For example, significant information contained in the book comes from penetrating interviews that Feinstein conducted with insightful insiders.

On balance, the book’s immense strength in detail overcomes its scattered style

Those who persist through Feinstein’s voluminous accounts of greed, corruption, and dispensed deadliness — at all levels of economic and political activity — will probably come to see that the arms trade and the Military Industrial Complex are:

(a) the same thing

and

(b) seamlessly tied into the developed world’s institutions of economy, military and governance.

Feinstein eventually goes on to prove the following statement — taken from the book’s Introduction:

The corrupt and secretive way the industry operates undermines accountable democracy in both buying and selling countries.

The combination of the sheer magnitude of the contracts, the very small number of people who make the purchasing decisions and the cloak of national security lends itself to bribery and corruption on a massive scale.

[T]he goods purchased often cost far more than initially quoted [— Feinstein later proves that this is by design —], are not able to perform as promised, and are produced or delivered years behind schedule.

[T]he all-encompassing secrecy that often characterizes arms deals hides corruption, conflicts of interest, poor decision-making and inappropriate national security choices.

As a consequence, this trade, which should be among the most highly controlled and regulated, is one of the least scrutinized and accountable areas of government and private activity.

[T]here is a continuous ‘revolving door’ through which people move between government, the military and the arms industry. The companies not only make significant financial contributions to politicians and their parties but also provide employment opportunities to former state employees, retired officers and defeated politicians. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the United States of America.

The pervasive, largely unchallenged common interests of defence manufacturers, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and members of Congress and the executive suggest that the US is effectively a national security state.

This is not a book for la-la-la optimists — however, realists and cynics will delight

Take what Feinstein calls “The Nazi Connection.” Chapter 2 takes us on a wide-ranging tour of ex-Nazis’ success in selling their various bits of expertise to the post-War allies — especially including the United States — while simultaneously escaping punishment for war crimes and even reaching levels of financial success and prestige in the process.

We can conclude from this chapter and subsequent others that, if one has something that other people want, one can profit outrageously and without paying for past wrongs.

Properly footnoted, too

The book’s footnotes are a wealth of source material.

Unlike many scholarly works, Feinstein does not further process his arguments in them, which most lay readers will probably find to be a good thing. The text is well written, but tediously detailed enough without unnecessarily adding another layer of the same thing in the footnotes.

Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double Government (2015) — makes an ideal companion to The Shadow World

Professor Glennon explains how reason, practicality, and common sense have been overwhelmed by the self-interested web of allegedly “security-serving” institutions and people who run the United States.

Where Feinstein provides the illustrative facts that demonstrate the arguable evil of all this, Glennon provides an institutional dynamic of how the phenomenon works in the United States.

The moral? — The Shadow World is an outstanding resource for those willing to plod through voluminous detail

I agree with the book’s Amazon dot com reviewers that — despite its less than flowing story-telling allure — the book is an admirable effort at exposing the ethical rot at epidemic militarism’s core.

Shadow World is a picture of what happens, when morality and wisdom completely drop out of the picture of wise governance.

PeteFree.com

Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2011) — Book Review