Darfur Dreams
In late March 2006, Cofer Black flew to Amman, Jordan, where he represented Blackwater at one of the world’s premier war bazaars, the Special Operations Forces Exhibition and Conference (SOFEX). More than 220 companies ranging from weapons manufacturers and arms dealers to military consultants and trainers to full-blown mercenary outfits were on hand to peddle their goods and services to wealthy governments from across the Middle East, North Africa, and the world. The organizers boasted that SOFEX is “the world’s leading special operations forces, homeland security, counter terrorism and security forces exhibition and conference serving the global defense market.”10 After the Cold War, the Middle East quickly became one of the world’s hungriest markets for military equipment and training services, and the biennial conference was a valued chance for military commanders and planners to examine and purchase the latest wares international war contractors and military merchants had to offer. In attendance were military delegations from forty-two countries and more than seventy-five hundred visitors from across the globe. As the conference’s promotional materials boasted, “In the last decade, the Middle East has emerged as the largest importing region for security and military defence equipment, representing approximately 60% of the global defence expenditure.”11 As though to give the affair an extra air of legitimacy, the managing director of the conference, Amer Tabbah, touted the fact that SOFEX had been “accredited by the US Department of Commerce… showing the global trust and belief held by many.”12
The SOFEX conference was sponsored by one of President Bush’s closest Arab allies, King Abdullah of Jordan. Unlike his father, the late King Hussein, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S./U.K.-educated Abdullah provided key support to the Bush administration in the build-up and execution of the Iraq invasion. Jordan has also served as a major transit point and staging ground for war-servicing corporations supporting the occupation in neighboring Iraq. Blackwater, like the White House, developed a special relationship with Jordan, opening an office in Amman early on in the Iraq occupation.13 Since King Abdullah took over from his deceased father in 1999, he has worked assiduously to modernize and Westernize Jordan’s military capabilities and to bolster its prominence as a force in the region. When King Abdullah—himself a former Special Operations commander14—decided in 2004 to create a five-hundred-man special operations counter-terrorism aviation unit, Jordan hired Blackwater to conduct the training for the elite force.15 The contract, however, was held up by the State Department because of export-control regulations governing the sensitive nature of training foreign military forces. In early December 2004, King Abdullah visited Washington and reportedly raised the issue of the stalled Blackwater contract with almost every U.S. official he met.16 Soon thereafter the contract was given the go-ahead by the Bush administration. The Jordanian unit would receive training in operating various militarized assault helicopters, such as Blackhawks and Hughes MD500s, for use in counterterror operations, quick-air assaults, and forward reconnaissance. Jordan said it would pay for the training with part of its approximately $1 billion in annual U.S. military assistance.17 “The Jordanians came to us,” said Erik Prince. “They hired us to help build their squadrons, to teach them how to fly at night on goggles, to mount operations out of a helicopter.”18
As an exclamation point to King Abdullah’s drive to remake the Jordanian military, just ahead of the SOFEX conference, officials of the kingdom confirmed they had completed plans for what they called the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center in Jordan, a $100 million project also funded by the U.S. government.19 King Abdullah said the training center project was being supervised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the monarch’s description sounded as though he was constructing a facility modeled after Blackwater’s Moyock training compound. Abdullah said the facility would be used for the “training of both national and regional special operations forces, counter-terrorism forces, security and emergency service units, and to act as the premier live-fire training center for the Middle East.”20 Indeed, members of Jordan’s elite antiterror unit, Battalion 71, had participated in Blackwater’s 2004 SWAT Challenge in Moyock and had seen the company’s vaunted U.S. training facility firsthand.21
Blackwater’s special relationship with Jordan and its king made the company a miniphenomenon at the international war bazaar in Amman in March 2006. Blackwater chose the SOFEX conference to unveil its newly formed parachute team, which performed publicly for the first time at the conference opening at King Abdullah I air base.22 But while Blackwater’s parachute team may have wowed spectators on the ground, it was Cofer Black who stole the show on the opening day. Black “astonished” international Special Forces representatives when he declared that Blackwater was prepared to deploy a private brigade-sized force to conflict or crisis zones worldwide.23 “It’s an intriguing, good idea from a practical standpoint because we’re low-cost and fast,” Black said. “The issue is, who’s going to let us play on their team?”24 As an example, Black suggested that Blackwater could deploy its force in the Darfur region of Sudan, adding that Blackwater had already pitched the idea to unnamed U.S. and NATO officials. “About a year ago, we realized we could do it,” Black said. “There is clear potential to conduct security operations at a fraction of the cost of NATO operations.” Black was mobbed after his remarks by throngs of defense suppliers excited about the prospect of new markets being described by one of the industry’s star players, not to mention one of America’s most legendary spies. Black explained that Blackwater is a self-sustained operation. “We’ve war-gamed this with professionals,” he said. “We can do this.” He was quick to add that the company would not contradict U.S. policy by renting its services to enemies of the government. “We’re an American company,” Black declared. “We would get the approval of the U.S. government for anything we did for our friends overseas.”25
After Black’s remarks in Jordan, Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor expanded on his firm’s vision for a Sudan deployment. “Of course we could provide security at refugee camps, defensive security,” Taylor said. “What we seek to do first is to be the best deterrent that we can possibly be.”26 He boasted that Blackwater could mobilize faster than the UN or NATO. “In the time that it takes to put an internationally recognized body unit on the ground, I can be there in a third of that time and I will be 60 percent cheaper,” Taylor told National Public Radio.27 But independent experts disputed Blackwater’s claims. “It’s comparing real apples with fictional oranges,” said P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution. “NATO or UN operations represent a full array of political commitment and activities, not simply a small set of guys with guns and a CASA 212. That’s why they are expensive and completely different.”28
Blackwater wasn’t just talking about Darfur. Taylor also broadened the private-army-for-hire theme, floating the idea of the Iraqi government hiring Blackwater’s men to quell attacks by resistance groups. “We clearly couldn’t go into the whole country of Iraq,” Taylor told the Virginian-Pilot. “But we might be able to go into a region or a city.” Cofer Black and other company officials spun their vision for “peacekeeping,” “stabilization,” and “humanitarian” operations as being born of moralistic outrage over human suffering. The international community, they argued, is slow to respond and ineffective, while, as Black said in Jordan, “Blackwater spends a lot of time thinking, How can we contribute to the common good?” What Blackwater executives rarely, if ever, discuss in public is the tremendous profit to be made in servicing disasters, crises, and wars. In Jordan Blackwater and other mercenary firms aggressively promoted an internationalization of the rapid privatization of military and security the benefits of which they now enjoy in the United States. Under the soft banner of “humanitarianism,” these companies hoped to take “business” away from international governmental bodies like the UN, NATO, and the African and European Unions. For Blackwater, such a transformation would mean permanent profit opportunity, limited only by the number of international crises, disasters, and conflicts. “World stability and peacemaking/-keeping operations have been criminally cost-ineffective and operationally failed,” said Blackwater’s Taylor. “Send 10,000 UN troops to Darfur? A colossal waste of money. You do not create security and peace by throwing more mediocre, uncommitted people into the fray.”29