(NYT) Author of the definitive 1980-90’s history of AFPAK (GHOST WARS) - LIBYA: DON’T ARM THE REBELS

LIBYA: DON’T ARM THE REBELS

Posted by Steve Coll

Viktor Bout, a former Soviet Air Force officer who allegedly became an unscrupulous arms merchant, currently resides in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Thailand’s government extradited him to the United States following his arrest in Bangkok during a sting operation in which American agents allegedly fooled Bout into believing that he had a chance to make money selling weapons to Colombian rebels. (Bout, who will go on trial this fall, denies the charges.)

I first heard about Bout when I travelled in West Africa during the nineteen-nineties, covering some of its rebellions and struggling states. My then Washington Post colleague Douglas Farah was based in Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, around the same time, and became intrigued enough about the mayhem Bout was alleged to have been aiding, through arms sales to ragtag West African rebel groups, that he co-authored a book, entitled “Merchant of Death.”

It might be justifiable to arm the rebels if that were only way to achieve the humanitarian objectives of the intervention. Yet there isn’t any evidence that it would be necessary to do so to defend Benghazi as a sanctuary. It seems clear that Benghazi can be defended from the air by NATO, even if that requires enforcing “no-drive” zones occasionally

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