“I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives,” said veteran U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last Ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The billions of dollars being doled out to war companies, Wilson argues, “makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?”192
While the bipartisan privatization virus spreads further, companies like Blackwater become ever more deeply embedded in the most sensitive sectors of government. Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren’t enough to slow it down. Even if Blackwater were to go out of business tomorrow, there are scores of companies that would gladly step in to take over its work.
While radical privatization is having a devastating impact throughout society, the privatization of the war machine has been lethal. Blackwater is a company whose business depends on war and conflict to thrive. It operates in a demand-based industry where corporate profits are intimately linked to an escalation of violence. That demand has been tremendous during the presidency of George W. Bush. In particular, the unprecedented militarization of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which has occurred in tandem with the process of rapid privatization, has enriched Blackwater. The department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services was originally envisioned as a small-scale bodyguard operation to protect small groups of U.S. diplomats and other U.S. and foreign officials. In Iraq, the administration turned it into a paramilitary force several thousand strong. Spending on the program jumped from $50 million in 2003 to $613 million in 2006.193 According to the Congressional Oversight Committee’s investigation, “In fiscal year 2001, Blackwater had $736,906 in federal contracts. By 2006, Blackwater had over $593 million in government contracts, an increase of more than 80,000%.”194 In 2007, Blackwater had two-thirds as many operatives deployed in Iraq as the U.S. Bureau of Diplomatic Security had in all other countries in the world combined. As Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in late 2007, “There is simply no way at all that the State Department’s 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.”195
As of summer, 2007, there were more “private contractors” deployed on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq (180,000) than there were actual soldiers (160,000).196 These contractors worked for some 630 companies and drew personnel from more than 100 countries around the globe.197 Tens of thousands were armed operatives like those who work for Blackwater—exactly how many was unknown, because neither the administration nor the military could or would provide those numbers. This meant the U.S. military had actually become the junior partner in the coalition that occupies Iraq. The existence of a powerful shadow army enabled the waging of an unpopular war with forces whose deaths and injuries went uncounted and unreported. It helped keep a draft, which could make the continuation of the war politically untenable, off the table. It also subverted international diplomacy because the administration didn’t need to build a “coalition of the willing”: it rented an occupation force. Private soldiers were hired from countries that had no direct stake in the war or whose home governments opposed it, and were used as cheap cannon fodder.
War is business, and business has been very good. It is not just the actions of Blackwater and its ilk that need to be investigated, exposed, and prosecuted. It is the whole system. If the insatiable demand for these mercenary “services,” which derives from offensive, unpopular wars of conquest, is not forcefully challenged, Blackwater and other mercenary firms have little to fear. In street parlance, they are the dealers, but the government is the addict. These companies are not simply bad apples. They are the fruit of a very poisonous tree. This system depends on a wedding of immunity and impunity. If the government started slapping mercenary firms with indictments for war crimes or murder or human rights violations—and not just in a token manner—the risk for the companies would be tremendous. This, in turn, would make wars like the one in Iraq far more difficult and arguably impossible. But even after the outrage of Nisour Square, there was no sign of this happening. In early 2008, President Bush once again sought to force the Iraqi government to extend immunity to private contractors, as he negotiated a new “Status of Forces” agreement with Baghdad.198 He also said he would “waive” a provision of a 2008 law—which he signed—that would have established a bipartisan Wartime Contracting Commission to investigate war contractors, as well as one that provided protections for whistleblowers working for government contractors. In a statement, Bush said these provisions would “inhibit the President’s ability” to “protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief.”199
While Bush undoubtedly has been the war industry’s greatest supporter, the prospect for the aggressive action required to confront the mercenary menace, whether a Democrat or Republican replaces him in the White House, is slim. The war industry is an equal-opportunity campaign contributor and has solid support from influential politicians on both sides of the aisle. Representative Schakowsky introduced legislation in late 2007 called the Stop Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, which sought to end the use of Blackwater and other mercenary firms in U.S. war zones by 2009. “Private contracting companies have forfeited their right to represent the United States,” Schakowsky said, asserting that they “put our troops in harm’s way, and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. They have become a liability instead of an asset.”200 Only a small fraction of the 435 legislators in the House signed on to support her bill and, as of spring 2008, only two senators—Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and New York’s Hillary Clinton.
Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to hold mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq and the Democrats’ unwillingness to effectively challenge the radically privatized war machine, the only hope the victims of Nisour Square have for justice lies in the lawsuit they filed against Blackwater in Washington, D.C. In some ways, that is the most logical place for such a trial to take place, because the violence unleashed by Blackwater in Iraq is ultimately rooted in the for-profit war machine based in the U.S. capital. Shortly after Nisour Square, Erik Prince was asked by an interviewer, “How many Iraqi civilians have been killed by Blackwater employees?” “That’s an unknowable number,” Prince replied, in a rare moment of candor on the subject.201 The significance of that acknowledgment was not lost on the lawyers suing Blackwater for Nisour Square. “What these Iraqi families are doing is a civil service to all Iraqis because they don’t want anyone else to be killed by Blackwater,” attorney Susan Burke said. “We are going to expose the corporate culture that is leading to all this death and destruction in Iraq.”202