Culture » May 22, 2007

These Guns for Hire

Blackwater unites conservative Catholics, evangelicals and neoconservatives to fight a theoconservative holy war

By Chris Barsanti

As reported in Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater (Nation Books), one of the largest providers of private security assets to the U.S. military is more than a business: It’s a well-armed and well-funded cog in the military-industrial complex led by a self-styled Christian warrior with deep ties to the right’s theo-con fringe. In short, the sort of thing to keep any right-minded, small-d democrat awake at night. Although the book itself is essentially a magazine feature bloated up to book length without the additional research needed to justify the heft, the facts at its core are the eye-widening stuff of lurid conspiracy novels.

The Christian warrior described above is Erik Prince, son of auto parts multi-millionaire Edgar Prince, who, until his death in 1995, ran bucolic Holland, Mich., as a company town and provided seed money for, among other causes, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Although Erik, a stridently orthodox Catholic convert and former SEAL, wouldn’t take over the family business, he followed in Edgar’s footsteps in other ways. In 1997, Erik founded Blackwater USA, a private security firm based on several thousand acres of North Carolina swamp. A number of Blackwater executives are deeply conservative Christians, including corruption-smeared former Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, who is also a member of the Sovereign Order of Malta, which Scahill describes as “a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century [to defend] ‘territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the Moslems.’” Blackwater makes hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts from the Pentagon and fields what might be the world’s largest private military force, with 2,300 armed men working around the globe, and a database with 21,000 more. As many critics have ominously noted, the company already has enough man- and firepower to take over a small Third World country.

Given all that, it’s not hard to buy Scahill’s charge that Prince, “who has been in the thick of this right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war,” has essentially created a modern-day Praetorian Guard that Prince envisions as the tip of the Christian right’s spear. This also seems to be exactly how the administration wants it.

The unholy admixture of extreme capitalism and right-wing political ideology has rarely been more perfectly realized than in the convenient marriage of the Bush era’s global war doctrine and the rise of freelance gunsels like Blackwater. Since the ’90s, Rumsfeld and Cheney had both been pushing the outsourcing agenda with evangelical fervor. (Rumsfeld once called for the military to behave more like “venture capitalists.”) As they saw it, the war on terror/Iraq/whoever would be better fought by flexible units of contractors. After the Pentagon spent some $300 billion on contractors between 1994 and 2002, it was hardy surprising that the Defense Department’s 2006 Quadrennial Review redefined “Total Force” to include contractors, essentially deputizing mercenaries into the U.S. military. One out of 60 U.S. military personnel serving in the Gulf War theater of operations were contractors; in the Iraq War by late 2006 that ratio was by some counts almost one to one.

Firms like Blackwater are so central to the administration’s war efforts that Paul Bremer’s last act before leaving Baghdad was issuing Order 17, “immunizing all contractors in Iraq from prosecution.” So if any of the thousands of contractors currently employed in Iraq or Afghanistan were to commit a Haditha-like rampage (Blackwater employs many ex-Chilean commandos from the Pinochet era), it wouldn’t be clear what, if any, justice they could possibly face. To make matters more muddled, it’s not even clear who all these contractors are even working for, even though almost 650 contractors had been killed in Iraq by September 2006. After the infamous incident on March 31, 2004—when four Blackwater employees were ambushed in Fallujah, their bodies mutilated and set on fire—nobody could ever conclusively say what the men were even doing there, who they were working for and under whose command. The truth was buried in a mire of bureaucratic and subcontracting smokescreens. Representing Blackwater against a lawsuit from the dead men’s families (one of whom memorably referred to the company as a “whore of war”) was none other than Kenneth Starr.

Indeed, Scahill has a fantastic subject here in Blackwater. But having such a wealth of easy targets to lob stones at seems to keep him from digging deeper or casting a wider net in the manner of a Steve Coll or Jon Lee Anderson. The thinness of Scahill’s approach is most apparent in his habit of excessively repeating key facts, sometimes replicating entire sentences verbatim. That said, Blackwater raises a host of deeply disturbing questions about where America’s military is being led by this new breed of free-market mercenaries—merchants of death who see war as nothing more than a growth market.

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• Reader Comments

  “One out of 60 U.S. military personnel serving in the Gulf War theater of operations were contractors; in the Iraq War by late 2006 that ratio was by some counts almost one to one.”

  Really? One to one, REALLY? I would love to see real figures of how many US soldiers are in Iraq and how many contractors are there.

  Posted by wolf on May 22, 2007 at 6:43 PM

  “Wolf” - Given the secrecy and lack of oversight under which most contractors in Iraq work, a true number is impossible to get. However, the Washington Post’s Renae Merle reported in December that around 100,000 contractors were in Iraq, at a time when there were roughly 140,000 US troops there. This was a dramatic increase from the Gulf War, when only about 9200 contractors were in the theater of operation. So as you can tell, it may not be exactly a one-to-one ratio (though some estimates are higher) but still a stunningly large number.

  Posted by wintermute on May 23, 2007 at 12:21 PM

  wintermute - thanks for the update. I find it incredible that there may be 100,000 contractors on the ground in Iraq. I have posted in a link that seems to be congruent with your assertion above. I am amazed that this is (apparently) not well known public information. Thanks again!

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR20061204013 311.html

  Posted by wolf on May 23, 2007 at 2:41 PM

  You gotta hand it to Bush & Co., they’re f’n geniuses at avoiding limits on their actions. If as alleged almost half of the personnel in Iraq are mercenaries rather than sworn troops (reflecting off the exchange between wintermute and wolf above), then that’s 1000s of operatives who basically don’t have to concern themselves at all with congressional oversight, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or even what little independent journalism still remains that might have a prayer of scrutinizing them.

  Well, they’ve obviously always wanted a free hand, unencumbered by pesky checks and balances; this is another facet.

  Posted by Kuya on May 28, 2007 at 4:19 AM

  The latest figures I’ve seen indicate that there are 150,000 US military personel in Iraq, and at least 126,000 contractors of which approximately 48,000 are PMC’s or private military contractors.

  These are stunning numbers and it should also be noted that the official discussions of withdrawal from Iraq, when they have occured at all, never mention the PMC’s.

  This story is among the very most important of the many important stories that need our attention right now.

  For some powerful background on the miserable politcal scene in the US I suggest that those with access to a high speed internet connection google up Adam Curtis, the British documentarian, and you can watch his “The Power of Nightmares” and “The Century of the Self”. These two multi-part works give the viewer an excellent sketch of the difficulties facing our modern day “democracy” as we suffer through a maze of manipulation woven by the mass media tentacles of the miltary industrial congressional complex (Eisenhower’s original designation).

  The two documentaries, despite their critical acclaim, have yet to reach wider distribution in the US for the obvious reason that they are considered anathema to the American corporate elite.

  Check them out by all means.

  Posted by koolwill on May 29, 2007 at 12:41 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 34 posts.

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