Blackwater, Inc. And The Privatization Of The Bush War Machine
|
Blackwater
Mercenaries
As President Bush
took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday,
there were five American families receiving news that has become all
too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this
case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports
proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained
mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company
based in North Carolina –
Blackwater USA.
|
|
|
Blackwater At
Fallujah
The company made
headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and
burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja – two charred, lifeless
bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked
a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja
and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to
this day.
|
|
|
|
|
Their Helicopters
Shot Down
Now, Blackwater is
back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the
war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company’s helicopters was
brought down in one of Baghdad’s most violent areas.
|
|
|
$300 Million
Dollar Contracts
The men who were
killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater’s
$300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the
company’s initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul
Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is
also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view
the men’s bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were
unclear because of "the fog of war."
|
|
|
|
|
Bush Wants A
Civilian Reserve Corp
Bush made no mention
of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union
speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war’s
privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy – the need for more
troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of
about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years.
He then slipped in a
mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant
development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war
machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.
|
"Such a corps would
function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on
the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical
skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush
declared. This is precisely what the administration has already
done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with
little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs.
Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an
outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.
|
|
|
50,000 In Iraq
Already, private
contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last
count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000
work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability
Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight
or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of
the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to
$1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What’s more, these
forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted
in the official toll.
|
|
|
|
|
Erik Prince
The president’s
proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized
version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the
secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA
and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign
to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince
– a major bankroller of the president and his allies – pitched the
idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to
supplement the official military. "There’s consternation in the
[Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince
declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked
about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that.
Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He
added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."
|
|
|
Prince's Private Army
And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his
own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training
camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing."
Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and
intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It
has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global
war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world,
a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New
Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding
to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the
FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the
hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the
president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President
Eisenhower warned against in 1961.
|
|
Further privatizing
the country’s war machine – or inventing new back doors for military
expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps – will
represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy.
|
|