[Peace-discuss] Blackwater …

[Morton K. Brussel]

Published on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by TruthDig.com

Checkbook Imperialism: The Blackwater Fiasco

by Robert Scheer

Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some  
other, fresher way to explain why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is  
dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the “democratically elected  
government” of “liberated” Iraq does not explicitly have the legal  
power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000  
private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to  
Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.

Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from  
the ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater  
would have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of  
keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry  
claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a U.S. State Department  
convoy through the streets of Baghdad fired “randomly at citizens” in  
a crowded square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13 others.  
So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country  
after what a government spokesman called a “flagrant assault … on  
Iraqi citizens.”

But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to  
control anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel  
working for the U.S. in Iraq? Don’t they know about Order 17, which  
former American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant  
contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from  
Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of  
power from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once  
headed, to the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and  
guarded by Blackwater and other “private” soldiers.

They are “private” in the same fictional sense that our uniformed  
military is a “volunteer” force, since both are lured by the dollars  
offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government. Contractors earn  
substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and  
an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the  
uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in  
the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a  
conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by  
now in protest.

Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S. government purchases  
whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private  
contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus  
contract to protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That is  
why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri al- 
Maliki branded a “crime,” is so difficult to deal with. Iraqis are  
clearly demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other  
contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be  
scrutinizing the status of all private security firms working in the  
country.

But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As  
the Associated Press reported on Monday: “The U.S. clearly hoped the  
Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of  
responsibility and compensation to the victim’s families-and not  
insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here  
without.” Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate  
last week: “There is simply no way at all that the State Department  
Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time  
personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no  
alternative except through contracts.”

Consider the irony of that last statement-that the U.S. experiment in  
building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of  
foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to  
launch the American Revolution. As George Washington warned in his  
farewell address, once the American government enters into these  
“foreign entanglements,” we lose the Republic, because public  
accountability is sacrificed to the necessities of war for empire.

Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue  
from the U.S. government-much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no  
doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by  
company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents-its  
operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and  
others in this international security racket operate as independent  
states of their own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the  
ones that the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed forces.  
“We are not simply a ‘private security company,’ ” Blackwater boasts  
on its corporate website. “We are a professional military, law  
enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm. …  
We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting  
the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom  
and democracy everywhere.”

Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for  
The San Francisco Chronicle.