[NYTr] Checkbook Imperialism -The Blackwater Fiasco

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

TruthDig - Sep 18, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070918_checkbook_imperialism_the_blackwater_fiasco/

Checkbook Imperialism:  The Blackwater Fiasco

By Robert Scheer

Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it.  Find some other,
fresher way to explain why "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is dependent upon
killer mercenaries.  Or why the "democratically elected government" of
"liberated" Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel
Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private
contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to Iraq
accountable for their deadly actions.

Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from the
ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater would
have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of keeping up
appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry claimed that the
Blackwater thugs guarding a U.S. State Department convoy through the
streets of Baghdad fired "randomly at citizens" in a crowded square on
Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13 others.  So the Iraqi
government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country after what a
government spokesman called a "flagrant assault ... on Iraqi citizens."

But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to control
anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel working
for the U.S. in Iraq?  Don't they know about Order 17, which former
American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant contractors,
including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from Iraqi
prosecution?  Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of power
from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to
the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded by
Blackwater and other "private" soldiers.

They are "private" in the same fictional sense that our uniformed
military is a "volunteer" force, since both are lured by the dollars
offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government.  Contractors earn
substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and an
all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the
uniformed military.  All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in
the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a
conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by
now in protest.

Instead, we have checkbook imperialism.  The U.S. government purchases
whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private
contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract
to protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq.  That is why the
latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
branded a "crime," is so difficult to deal with.  Iraqis are clearly
demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other contractors, and
on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be scrutinizing the
status of all private security firms working in the country.

But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As the
Associated Press reported on Monday: "The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis
would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of responsibility
and compensation to the victim's families-and not insist on expelling a
company that the Americans cannot operate here without." Or, as
Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate last week: "There
is simply no way at all that the State Department 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."

Consider the irony of that last statement-that the U.S. experiment in
building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of
foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to
launch the American Revolution.  As George Washington warned in his
farewell address, once the American government enters into these
"foreign entanglements," we lose the Republic, because public
accountability is sacrificed to the necessities of war for empire.

Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue
from the U.S. government-much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no
doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by
company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents-its operations
remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and others in this
international security racket operate as independent states of their
own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that the U.S.
government applies to its own uniformed forces.  "We are not simply a
'private security company,' " Blackwater boasts on its corporate
website. "We are a professional military, law enforcement, security,
peacekeeping, and stability operations firm. ... We have become the
most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic
balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy
everywhere."

Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?