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In Iraq, Bush's Rent-an-Army
By Jeremy Scahill
The Los Angeles Times
Monday 29 January 2007
As President Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address
last week, 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.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed
and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Falluja - 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 Falluja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance
that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized
the war has become. Last week, one of the company's helicopters was brought
down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. 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 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.
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.
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."
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
Dwight D. 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.
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Jeremy Scahill is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author
of the forthcoming Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary
Army. He wrote this commentary for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing
newspaper.
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