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Views > October 11, 2007

Blackwater Nation

Contracting soldiers of fortune is only one example of our recent philosophy of government

By Brian Cook

Those seeking to pinpoint the date that propelled the private military firm Blackwater into its prominent (and disastrous) position in the U.S. military apparatus might look toward Sept. 11, 2001. Al Clark, one of the company’s co-founders, once remarked, “Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today.” And two weeks after 9/11, Erik Prince, the company’s other co-founder and current CEO, told Bill O’Reilly that, after four years in the business, “I was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security. The phone is ringing off the hook now.”

However, in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein suggests that we should turn the calendar back one day and read the speech that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon staffers on Sept. 10, 2001. The day before 19 hijackers flew passenger flights into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Rumsfeld darkly warned of “a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. … With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Who was this dastardly adversary? “[T]he Pentagon bureaucracy.”

Declaring “an all-out campaign to shift the Pentagon’s resources from bureaucracy to battlefield, from tail to the tooth,” Rumsfeld told his staff to “scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing.” He mentioned healthcare, housing and custodial work, and said that, outside of “warfighting,” “we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively.”

As Jeremy Scahill has reported, the implementation of that plan has been wildly successful, with at least 180,000 private contractors currently employed in Iraq, outnumbering U.S. troops by 20,000, even after the “surge.” (In the first Gulf war, the soldier-to-contractor ratio was 60:1.) But the results have been disastrous, from the deplorable conditions at the recently privatized Walter Reed military hospital, to the contaminated food and fecal-soiled bathing water that Halliburton provided to U.S. troops, to the gung-ho Blackwater contractors who prefer to shoot Iraqi hearts rather than win them.

This outsourcing of the military’s core services is in keeping with the Bush administration’s philosophy of government. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that we’ve seen the same dynamic at work in the IRS, with the agency outsourcing debt collection of back taxes to private companies, which then receive a share of the return for their work.

But to lay the blame solely at the feet of the Bush administration is to overlook the complicity of Democrats in accepting a neoliberal agenda that has gutted government services and redistributed its wealth into the hands of private interests. After all, the Clinton administration first expanded the use of military contractors, deploying them in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and Colombia.

In fact, in late September, as the most recent Blackwater massacres started to gain mainstream press attention, hundreds of corporate luminaries joined Bill Clinton in New York City to extol the charitable efforts of the Clinton Global Initiative. The former president said his humanitarian endeavor is needed to tackle education, poverty and global warming because these are issues the “government won’t solve, or that government alone can’t solve.”

That might be true, but only because we’ve undergone 30 years of a political ideology that has robbed government of needed revenues, derided regulation that might impinge on corporate profits and sneered at the idea that a public spirit could be preferable to private motives. Rather than rely on the charity of those who have so handsomely profited, it’s time we alter the perverse arrangement.

Brian Cook is an associate editor at In These Times.

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  • Reader Comments

    I like Blackwater. I think we should bring them home so they can wage “Liberal” season.

    Posted by waypasthadenough on Oct 15, 2007 at 8:31 PM

    The reason is obvious: the empire couldn’t face the possibility of strong anti-war groups taking to the streets or claiming for their children’s welfare, as in VietNam’s days when they were on the draft.
    So, what better option than contracting trained killers to do the dirty job so that nice, educated boys from “nice, educated families” needn’t stain their hands in “savages”’ blood? No wonder there are so many useful idiots bragging about USA’s power and justifying what has no moral justification as long as they continue living safely, without having to fear for their sons’lives. At the same time, although wars are costly they will in the end be paid by oil and other natural resources from the lands they have invaded. Fortunately, there are still many American citizens who feel ashamed and many ongs and groups who are trying to have their voices heard, now called “liberals” or “progressives” as if those adjectives meant something nasty.

    Waypastadenough’s cynical comment is but one example of the cruelty, contempt for others and arrogance that emanates from the rapacious sub-species.

    Posted by Maria on Oct 17, 2007 at 2:48 PM

    “Rapacious,” now that’s a new one. I bet you had to thumb through your thesaurus half a day to come up with that one. Well, it’s more imaginative than, ‘racist,’ ‘extremist,’ ‘mean spirited,’ etc. that we used to get automatically tagged with just for questioning “LIberal” garbage posing as reality.

    But I think you missed this time:

    Main Entry:
    ra·pa·cious Listen to the pronunciation of rapacious
    Pronunciation:
    \rə-ˈpā-shəs\
    Function:
    adjective
    Etymology:
    Latin rapac-, rapax, from rapere to seize — more at rapid
    Date:
    1651

    1 : excessively grasping or covetous 2 : living on prey 3 : ravenous <a rapacious appetite>

    There’s nothing more covetous than a “Liberal” freak. The creatures either vote to steal from their neighbors to soothe their false coffee house consciences or to get a check from a govt. program. And there is no end to their appetite for control and regulation over their neighbors’ lives nor any end to their grasping for the hard earned incomes of others, rich or poor.

    Posted by waypasthadenough on Oct 17, 2007 at 5:44 PM

    Oh, and how could I forget to mention - they’re not ‘anti-war’ groups. They’re Marxist front groups. More examples of the Amerikan Communist Insurgency renaming itself to hide its evil.

    And as an older friend of mine said, “In Vietnam they should have shot the reporters first.”

    I’ll add to his regret by hoping I’ll live to see what they should have done decades ago, target the leaders of the American Communist Insurgency, whether they be in newsrooms, on college campuses, or in TV and radio stations spewing forth their propaganda to an unsuspecting and innocent public.

    And it’s the “Liberal” freaks who should be bragging. Their ideology has done as much as more than the corporations and the bankers to help build the empire, clogged as it is by bureaucracy and the tentacles of the ‘rapacious’ police state we exist under.

    Ask and “Liberal” freak if it wants to rid us of the IRS, the BATFE, or any other dept. of the federal empire. The answer would of course be “NO, we need to collect our taxes so we can regulate every aspect of every Amerikan’s life.”

    The only thing the “Liberal” freaks really want is to be in control of all of it. Then every thing would be A-OK.

    And they’ll tell any lie or twist any truth to achieve their goal of total control of all of us.

    That’s why we need “Liberal” season so badly.

    Posted by waypasthadenough on Oct 17, 2007 at 6:02 PM

    Waypasthadenough, I am afraid you are barking at the wrong tree. I used the word “rapacious” because it is the equivalent to the Spanish word “rapaz” which is a pretty common word in my native language. I have no connection whatsoever to any group: liberal, marxist, lefty, right-wing, nationalist,republican, neocon or any other of the names most people writing in this site usually apply as a way of insulting whoever thinks different.
    I am simply a human being, born in Latin America who can’t help noticing the growing violence exercised by USA in the way of wars or economical pressure over other countries and the consequences of such actions we are all suffering.
    My idea of a world where the new generations will have to live doesn’t include hunting people or shooting reporters, I am sorry.
    As to the paragraph where you express:
    “They’ll tell any lie or twist any truth to achieve their goal of total control of all of us” is exactlly what I see your government has been doing for a long time. ¿Do you mean to tell me they are Marxists? Well, that sure is a new one.

    Posted by Maria on Oct 18, 2007 at 10:55 PM

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