April 01, 2004
Contractors or Mercenaries?
Just wondering: why do we keep referring to the Americans who were killed in Faluja yesterday as contractors, when they are clearly part of the mercenary crowd?
The war in Iraq came to roost in tiny Moyock, N.C., when television footage of four dead Americans, their bodies burned and two of them dangling from a bridge over the Euphrates River, filled television screens there.The four were employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, an international security company here that is one of the area's largest employers.
......Many people who work for Blackwater, a company that provides security training and guard services to customers around the world, are former law enforcement personnel in Moyock and nearby communities, or military veterans, or both.
......Blackwater Security is a subsidiary of Blackwater USA, which provides a wide range of training and security services. Founded by two former Navy Seals in 1996, the company keeps a low profile as it operates its growing enterprise out of a sprawling 6,000-acre complex just south of the Virginia-North Carolina border in Currituck and Camden counties.
Here’s what’s going on: Soldiers leave the Army and are hired by private “contractors” who provide services to U.S. forces in Iraq. These private contractors then turn around and bill the government for expensive “security” that consists of the same soldiers that the Army was paying just a few months earlier. The private contractors get to make a nice profit, the mercenary soldiers get a fatter paycheck, and it appears that less American GIs are dying, because “contractor” deaths are not equated with “soldier” deaths, so W and the Pentagon look better too. Everybody wins. Well, everybody except the people of all nationalities who are brutally maimed and killed, including untold thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.
More details are emerging about Blackwater even as I prepare this post:
The four "civilians" killed, burned, and dragged through the streets of Fallujah, Iraq, on Wednesday morning weren’t really civilians. Or were they? They were employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, a rural North Carolina subsidiary of Blackwater USA, one of several dozen firms taking over the duties of the regular American military in Iraq, protecting buildings and grounds as well as officials.In fact, Blackwater itself is in charge of protecting L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, the U.S. official who now runs Iraq as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. In the coming weeks, hundreds of American civilian workers who really are civilians will be entering Iraq to work on private contracts let by the Bush government. Their security will be provided by guards (like the Blackwater men killed yesterday) from a variety of security firms, often consisting of former U.S. military special ops people.
The use of private military forces raises tricky questions for the U.S. government. The most important one is why is the Bush administration is recruiting civilians to work there when our government can't possibly guarantee the security of the area. Another question: Why aren't these jobs in combat zones being carried out by American military forces, instead of mercenaries?
Building up a surrogate military force, along the lines of the French Foreign Legion or the Gurkhas, has been the ambition of conservatives for many years. The thinking is that future wars will be characterized by "low-intensity," or guerrilla, warfare. If the fighting is done by a force of irregular surrogates, people won't question their casualties as they would those of regular military personnel. The contras in Nicaragua were an example of what a surrogate fighting force might look like, and special ops types from South Africa’s former apartheid regime have long been involved in fighting in southern Africa.
......In Iraq, Blackwater provides security not only for Bremer but also for food shipments in the turbulent Fallujah area.
The private security firms working in Iraq see big salaries as well as plenty of potential danger. Often, they have been seen in military garb but without the insignias that would formally designate them as U.S. military. This situation raises the question of whether or not they can be treated as soldiers under the Geneva conventions—whether they are provided those protections—or whether as irregulars they will get dealt with as spies.
Providing mercenaries is a popular and growing business in part because their use in places like Iraq presumably would release regular military personnel for other work—or allow them to go back to the U.S.
More on mercenaries here and here and here.
The Bush administration has transparently latched on the misleading term “contractor” specifically because it is more palatable and sympathetic to the average Joe than the term “Mercenary”, which conjures far darker imagery. (Shades of Vietnam…remember when we called the troups advisors?…sounded so much better on the news.)
This is obviously an issue of public perception, not the reading of statutes. The contractor-mercenary confusion is but this administrations most recent example of a cynical and systematic strategy of saying one thing with a wink for P.R. purposes while meaning something entirely different. Healthy forests…clear skies anyone?
Although there is scant evidence, I’m told great numbers of proud Americans do in fact have their very own dictionary:
Contractor
\Con*tract"or\, n. [L.] One who contracts; one of the parties to a bargain; one who covenants to do anything for another; specifically, one who contracts to perform work on a rather large scale, at a certain price or rate, as in building houses or making a railroad.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996
Mercenary
\Mer"ce*na*ry\, n.; pl. Mercenaries. One who is hired; a hireling; especially, a soldier hired into foreign service.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998
