As Blackwater continued to aggressively push its Sudan campaign, Behrends—the company’s top lobbyist—hit the airwaves of conservative radio to push for support. “We can be a huge help and catalyst and enabler to save those people,” said Behrends in a 2006 interview on The Danger Zone, the syndicated radio program of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On the program, Behrends was simply identified as a representative of Blackwater. “I’d like to make a point that any money that we made, we would pour back into the community there, clinics, schools, roads, whatever, because this is not a place that we want to make any money, this is just a place that we feel very strongly about helping,” he said.42
As with many of Blackwater’s deployments under the Bush administration, the company could rake in profits while serving the political and religious agenda of the administration and Erik Prince’s theoconservative allies. But aside from the political and religious motivations for Blackwater’s push to deploy in Sudan, the proposal provided a vivid glimpse into the corporate strategy Blackwater sees as a key to its future—repackaging mercenaries as peacekeepers. “There’s a lot of crises in the world,” said Singer, author of Corporate Warriors. “If they could get their foot in the door in them, it potentially opens up an entire new business sector for them.”43 While media reports at the time of the Jordan military conference suggested that Cofer Black’s “peacekeeping” proposal was a new development in Blackwater’s strategic vision, it had actually been in the works for at least a year. Author Robert Young Pelton said the company developed a detailed proposal for Blackwater deploying in Sudan soon after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Darfur in June 2004. “If you look at the presentation, it includes not only men with guns. They’re offering helicopter gunships, a fighter bomber that has the capacity to drop cluster bombs, and [satellite-guided weapons], armored vehicles,” Pelton said. “You say: ‘Wait a minute. That’s a lot of offensive force. What does that have to do with peacekeeping?’”44
In January 2006, three months before Cofer Black was dispatched to Jordan, Prince spoke to yet another military conference attended by scores of U.S. military officials. “One of the areas we could help is peacekeeping, perhaps. In Haiti you have a 9,000-man peacekeeping brigade at a cost of $496 million a year, the garrison commander just committed suicide, it’s in total disarray,” Prince said. “List for me—if you could—any really successful UN peacekeeping operations. I mean, I see the movie Hotel Rwanda and I get sick, and I say, Why did we let that happen? We can do something about that next time without a huge U.S. footprint. We can build a multinational brigade of professionals vetted to the same kind of State Department standards that they use for guarding embassies so we know we’re not employing war criminals and bad guys, train them, vet them, equip them, and now you have a multinational capability to do something with.”45 But, as Singer pointed out, “there is simply no support for such an overall privatized operation at the UN. The official line from the spokesperson is that it is ‘a nonstarter.’ I find it telling that two separate high-level panels of world leaders look at how to fix peacekeeping, and neither one even put privatizing peacekeeping as a point of discussion, let alone support it. They also didn’t talk about Martians coming in and running the peacekeeping operations, but then again, I guess Martians don’t have the same lobbying effort.”46 In a highly promotional cover story about Blackwater in 2006 in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway wrote, “Currently the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations has an annual budget of $7 billion, to say nothing of the billions in private charities and foreign aid pouring in to the world’s worst places. Even those suspicious of Blackwater’s motives must realize it makes good business sense that they would be interested in the work. Why chase after shady corporate clients when the mother lode is in helping people?”47 He called Blackwater “the alpha and omega of military outsourcing.”48
Not long after Black’s Sudan proposal in Jordan, Blackwater received boosts for its cause from several prominent commentators. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, penned a widely distributed column in the Los Angeles Times called “Darfur Solution: Send in the Mercenaries.”49 Boot wrote:
If the so-called civilization nations of the world were serious about ending what the U.S. government has described as genocide, they would not fob off the job on the U.N. They would send their own troops. But of course they’re not serious. At least not that serious. But perhaps there is a way to stop the killing even without sending an American or European army. Send a private army. A number of commercial security firms such as Blackwater USA are willing, for the right price, to send their own forces, made up in large part of veterans of Western militaries, to stop the genocide. We know from experience that such private units would be far more effective than any U.N. peacekeepers. In the 1990s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and the British firm Sandline made quick work of rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone. Critics complain that these mercenaries offered only a temporary respite from the violence, but that was all they were hired to do. Presumably longer-term contracts could create longer-term security, and at a fraction of the cost of a U.N. mission. Yet this solution is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations. They claim that it is objectionable to employ—sniff—mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peacekeeping forces and letting genocide continue.50
Boot subsequently suggested that Blackwater or another mercenary firm could be deployed in Sudan after being hired “by an ad hoc group of concerned nations, or even by philanthropists like Bill Gates or George Soros.”51 But it wasn’t just conservatives lining up to support Blackwater. One of the most venerable newsmen in U.S. history, Ted Koppel, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times published on May 22, 2006, called “These Guns for Hire,” which opened with the line, “There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army.”52 Koppel went on to provide “only a partial list of factors that would make a force of latter-day Hessians seem attractive:”
Growing public disenchantment with the war in Iraq; The prospect of an endless campaign against global terrorism; An over-extended military backed by an exhausted, even depleted force of reservists and National Guardsmen; The unwillingness or inability of the United Nations or other multinational organizations to dispatch adequate forces to deal quickly with hideous, large-scale atrocities (see Darfur and Congo); The expansion of American corporations into more remote, fractious and potentially hostile settings.