Mercenaries II

I had blogged here about the dangers of politically-tied American mercenary armies in Iraq and a lack of MSM attention after having read a story about Blackwater on IraqSlogger (linked to in my previous post). Well, a day after I wrote that entry this story popped up on Truthdig (nota bene: I had independently used the phrase "soldiers of fortune", which is a popular English translation of a Greek catch-phrase to describe Greek mercenaries during the Hellenistic period when the goddess of Fortune, or Tyche, was becoming quite popular and typified Hellenistic belief and politics). I hadn't heard of Jeremy Scahill's work or book until I read this, although now I see he had published some of his work-in-progress over at Alternet. I also saw him last night on C-Span 2 talking about his book. So obviously the story is starting to get some well-deserved attention. Once again lots of good work gets done and published on web sites, and the major outlets are slow to pick it up, and thus the American public.

Be that as it may, his research into Blackwater and other private outfits is extremely alarming – nay even shocking (BTW his comments on C-Span about the US using mercenaries to hide casualty figures and keep an unpopular war alive jibed well with #3's comments below). I'll just go on the record as saying that the extensive use of mercenaries, which if I heard Scahill right eats up 40% of the Iraq war budget on "security" to pay an army of 50K to protect officials and politicians, is a far more serious threat to the US's republican form of democracy than anything else could be. I'll go further. It's the most dangerous thing W and his Neoconservative undertakers have done while in office – the US Attorney scandal pales in comparison. We'll see how the lethargic, apathetic or enabling MSM handles this.

My first impression is not hopeful -- the guy who interviewed Scahill last night was a CBS newsman (can't remember his name) and he was asking questions about all these mercenaries over there as if there could be any justification whatsoever or this might not be a big deal. Ditto with the interviewers on Truthdig. Excuse me? There can be no legitimate justification here and the track record for mercenaries both as effective fighting forces and on politics is way beyond abysmal to downright disastrous. Have we been so inculcated by Republican talking points on privatization that we are blind even to this? It's like not taking a position on whether or not bringing back the divine right of kings is a good idea.

To wit, one of the universally-agreed-upon defining features of the malaise and sickness if the Greek city-states at the end of the Classical period and throughout the Hellenistic period was that they broke the relationship between citizen-army and state, corrupted and bankrupt the state, were ineffective, and thus left the Greek city-states powerless and eventually beholden to larger powers, such as the Macedonians and Romans. Lest we think that that was just the sissy Greeks, the same thing happened in late Republican Rome when various generals began competing with each other to run the sprawling empire, generals like Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Marc Antony and Octavian. Essentially they conscripted private armies who paid fealty to them and their own partisans more than the state and many of these brawls played out on the streets and polling booths of Rome.

You don't think it can happen here? Well, Scahill said something last night that blew me away. During Hurricane Katrina the Bush Administration hired Blackwater mercenaries who had worked in Iraq to patrol the Gulf. I see now he reported this before here and WaPo picked up on it in early September of 2005 as well here. So Scahill spent a lot of time trying to get info about their mandate in New Orleans and couldn't get much. Eventually he found out they were all making 300 bucks a day and Blackwater charged the government 900 bucks a day for each one (millions of bucks). He never found out what rules of engagement or legal authority they had. What happens if there's a big demonstration in DC in front of the White House as this war drags on and becomes more unpopular? Who is the Bush WH going to hire to do security in DC? How much you wanna bet we've got these private mercenaries already doing ops in Iran? Does Congressional authority and oversight extend to them? Apparently not, for at the hearings on funding last week several Congressional members complained they couldn't get any info on these groups.