For Blackwater, the opportunity of a lifetime would come when U.S. forces rolled into Baghdad in March 2003. Strapped with a GSA schedule and deep political and religious connections, Prince snagged a high-profile contract in Iraq that would position his men as the private bodyguards for the Bush administration’s top man in Baghdad, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III. Referred to as the “viceroy” or “proconsul,” Bremer was a diehard free-marketeer who, like Prince, had converted to Catholicism and passionately embraced the neoconservative agenda of using American military might to remake the world according to U.S. interests—all in the name of democracy. The Bremer contract meant that Prince would be at the helm of an elite private force deployed on the front lines of a war long sought by many of the forces that made up the theocon movement. Far from the simple shooting range on a North Carolina swamp that Blackwater was just a few years earlier, the company was now recognized by the Bush administration as an essential part of its war on terror armada. Blackwater president Gary Jackson, a career Navy SEAL, would soon boast that some of Blackwater’s contracts were so secret that the company couldn’t tell one federal agency about the business it was doing with another agency.114 Iraq was a pivotal coming-of-age moment for mercenaries, and Blackwater would soon emerge as the industry trendsetter. But less than a year after Prince’s forces deployed in Iraq, four of Blackwater’s men would find themselves on a fatal mission in the Sunni Triangle that would propel Blackwater to international infamy and forever alter the course of the U.S. occupation and Iraqi resistance to it. It happened in a city called Fallujah.
CHAPTER FOUR
FALLUJAH BEFORE BLACKWATER
“A stranger should be well-mannered.”
LONG BEFORE Blackwater deployed in Iraq—more than a decade earlier, in fact—events beyond the control of Erik Prince and his colleagues were setting in motion the epic ambush that would take place on March 31, 2004, when Iraqi resistance fighters killed four Blackwater contractors in broad daylight in the center of Fallujah. The killing of those Americans would alter the course of the Iraq War, spark multiple U.S. sieges of Fallujah, and embolden the antioccupation resistance movement.
But to begin the story of what happened to the Blackwater men that day with the particular details surrounding the ambush of their convoy, or even the events of the immediate days and weeks preceding the killings, is to ignore more than a decade of history leading up to the incident. Some would say the story goes even further back, to Fallujah’s fierce resistance to the British occupation of 1920, when an antioccupation rebellion in the city took the lives of some one thousand British soldiers almost a century before the United States invaded Iraq. Regardless, there is little question that the city of Fallujah has suffered like no other in Iraq since the U.S. invasion began in 2003. On several occasions, U.S. forces have attacked the city, killing thousands and displacing tens of thousands, and occupation troops have fired on unarmed demonstrators several times. Since the invasion, U.S. officials have brutally sought to make an example of the rebellious city. In the U.S. press and among the punditry, policy-makers, and military commanders, Fallujah has been portrayed as a hotbed of pro-Saddam resistance and as the seat of foreign fighters angered at the regime’s overthrow and furious at the U.S. occupation. But that is a very narrow, incomplete, and misleading presentation of history that serves only Washington’s agenda. As Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid noted, “[Fallujah’s] historical links with the former government constituted only part of the story. It was also a region shaped by rural traditions and reflexive nationalism, stitched together by a fierce interpretation of Islam and the certainty it brought. This fundamental identity and its attendant values became even more important as the community sank deeper into the sense of disenfranchisement voiced so often in this swath of Sunni land.”1 What is seldom acknowledged in the media is that before the first U.S. troops rolled into Iraq, before the Blackwater killings and the ensuing sieges of the city, before it became a symbol of Iraqi resistance, the people of Fallujah knew suffering at the hands of the United States and its allies.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Fallujah was the site of one of the single greatest massacres attributed to “errant” bombs during a war that was painted as the dawn of the age of “smart” weaponry. Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on the afternoon of February 13, 1991, allied warplanes thundered over the city, launching missiles at the massive steel bridge crossing the Euphrates River and connecting Fallujah to the main road to Baghdad.2 Having failed to bring the bridge down, the planes returned to Fallujah an hour later. “I saw eight planes,” recalled an eyewitness. “Six of them were circling, as if they were covering. The other two carried out the attack.”3 British Tornado warplanes fired off several of the much-vaunted laser-guided “precision” missiles at the bridge. But at least three missed their supposed target, and one landed in a residential area some eight hundred yards from the bridge, smashing into a crowded apartment complex and slicing through a packed marketplace.4 In the end, local hospital officials said more than 130 people were killed that day and some 80 others were wounded.5 Many of the victims were children. An allied commander, Capt. David Henderson, said the planes’ laser system had malfunctioned. “As far as we were concerned, the bridge was a legitimate military target,” Henderson told reporters.6 “Unfortunately, it looks as though, despite our best efforts, bombs did land in the town.” He and other officials accused the Iraqi government of publicizing the “errant” bomb as part of a propaganda war, saying, “We should also remember the atrocities committed by Iraq against Iran with chemical warfare and against [its] own countrymen, the Kurds.”7 As rescue workers and survivors dug through the rubble of the apartment complex and neighboring shops, one Fallujan shouted at reporters, “Look what Bush did! For him Kuwait starts here.”8
Whether or not it was an “errant” bomb, for the decade that followed that attack, it was remembered in Iraq as a massacre and would shape the way Fallujans later viewed the invading U.S. forces under the command of yet another President Bush.9 Already, the overwhelmingly Sunni population of Fallujah was one of Saddam Hussein’s most loyal populations within Iraq and the home of many of his elite Revolutionary Guard soldiers.10 “Even though Saddam Hussein regarded Fallujah as a city that had supported his regime, the Iraqi government couldn’t insulate Fallujah’s hospitals and clinics from the devastating effects of US-led economic sanctions,” recalled veteran human rights activist Kathy Kelly, founder of Voices in the Wilderness. 11 “We visited hospital wards before the invasion in Fallujah that were like ‘death rows’ for infants because of shortages caused by the sanctions.” Kelly has been to Iraq scores of times since first traveling there during the 1991 Gulf War. In a visit to Fallujah before the 2003 invasion, she said she and some British activists went to the city in an effort to acknowledge U.S./U.K. culpability in the marketplace bombing of 1991 and to interview survivors. Kelly got separated from the group and recalled, “One man began to shout at me, in English: ‘You Americans, you Europeans, you come to my home and I’ll show you water you wouldn’t give your animals to drink. And this is all that we have. Now, you want to kill our children again. You cannot kill my son. My son, he was killed in the first Bush war.’” After shouting at her, Kelly recalled, the man calmed down and offered her tea at his home. To her, that was evidence that “even in Fallujah, there might have been a chance to build fair and friendly relations, in spite of the suffering inflicted on ordinary Iraqis. But those chances were increasingly squandered by maintenance of economic sanctions and eventual bombing of the no-fly zones.” When U.S. Forces rolled into Iraq in April 2003, it didn’t take long for them to pour gasoline on the already volatile anti-American rage born in Fallujah at least twelve years earlier.