A few days ago, an Arab satellite station aired the film Lord of War (directed by Andrew Nichol and starring Nicholas Cage, 2005) as the Thai authorities were announcing their decision to hand over Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to the United States.

The film is basically about Bout and a number of arms merchants who have prospered after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eruption of small wars around the entire world, from the Balkans to South America, West Africa and Afghanistan. The dramatic treatment does not deprive the film of considerable accuracy in sketching the intersecting interests of great powers and their intelligence agencies and merchants of death. The lead character in the film always finds an American military official or politician to rescue him from the pursuit by international anti-arms trafficking bodies, especially in poor countries.

Bout claims that he has never sold a single weapon and that his only passion is for flying, as he owns several companies that are believed to transfer equipment to the American army in Iraq, as well as to the fighters of Charles Taylor in Liberia. He is an example of the modern “hero,” in the sense of central character in Hero of Our Time, by Mikhael Lermontov. The generation of young men after Napoleon’s war against Russia in the 19th century was a generation that lacked lofty values, as Lermontov saw it, and was inclined to sensual adventures that usually ended with the death of the hero. Indeed, the hero dies in a meaningless duel in the Caucasus, which saw a military gamble to expand by the Russian empire.

As for Bout, who is said to stand at the nexus of Russian intelligence, organized criminal gangs, and the political class in Moscow, the US offered to sell the Thai government a large amount of advanced weapons in exchange for turning him over. Moscow responded by sending shipments of oil at preferential prices, to preserve the secrets carried by the man, according to press reports. The Russian and American governments denied the news, in a move that was derived from a history of loyalty to the concept of separating between the covert and exposed worlds of international diplomacy. Arming rogue elements to fight dirty wars are among the things that no country in the world welcomes, as the details of such acts are published, or it is announced that a country is involved. Some eastern European countries, at the beginning of the 1990s, were in considerable need of liquidity, and the only thing that they could export were useless weapons, due to the new situation after the end of the cold war. But in return, these countries did not want to leave the international arena, where the big interests lie. People like Bout provided the solution to this predicament.

Bout’s arrest and the start of his extradition procedure to the US to be judged may not represent the end of the unjust aspect of globalization, which opened the world’s markets and capitals to each other, including the arms market and the blood money amassed in the safes of warlords. Rather, it is more logical to say that Bout and his associates will always find someone in need of their services. There will always be orders from protective sides that will release them and let them pursue their activities or allow the emergence of new generations of traffickers, arms dealers, and players in the grey zones of international relations and struggles.

Viktor Bout, or the model he represents, is nothing but a “hero of our time” and its values.