Merchants of Death: Blackwater USA
Mercenaries have been a part of war for millenia. The Carthaginians used them to attempt to hold off the growing might of Rome. The Italian city states, too weak individually to sustain a military, used them to defend from various European empires. The British used Hessian Jaeger mercenaries to try to help subdue their rebellious colonies along the Atlantic coast. But the idea of a mercenary seemed- for a while, at least- to be a method of war that had disappeared sometime before the First World War. Hidden from most of the world, unknown to Congress, unreported by the media, was the “private military contractor,” Blackwater.
Sounding more like Blackbriar from the Jason Bourne movies, Blackwater amounts to much the same thing. It is a shadow organization, unencumbered by the limits of Geneva or national ethics. As a corporation, it does not have to report to the government, yet it only acts when the government asks it to. Up to now, when they slip up in Iraq, too few people knew what was really happening. Blackwater had been asked by the Iraqi government (really by the State Department) to help defend key areas from insurgent attack. Yet, it is questionable if that is what Blackwater was really doing. The cold facts are as such: Blackwater USA was active in Iraq and came under fire from possible insurgents. The response was to fire randomly, killing at least eight Iraqi civilians, innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now Blackwater is in the wrong place. This is the seventh time that Blackwater has innocent blood on its hands, and they are now being brought to an Iraqi court to decide if they will remain in the country. I for one applaud this. The Iraqi minister of national security affairs, Shirwan al-Waili, declared that there was no justification for what Blackwater had done. The priliminary report of the situation found that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operations.” These allegations are extremely harsh and will likely devastate what little trust the world has in the capability of the USA to stem the insurgency.
Yet, that is not the only new development in the case against Blackwater. Federal prosecutors are investigating that Blackwater illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq, selling the weapons on the black market. If anything, Blackwater is actully helping the insurgency. One way or another, the organization will benefit from death, so long as they profit in some way, earning the title Merchants of Death. The organization itself has not said anything about either of these allegations. The website’s most recent press release is from June 2007, and the last news report on Blackwater that the company admits is from April! These are signs that CEO Erik Prince, a former Navy Seal, would much rather return to the shadows than hear his mercenary organization’s name every day on FOX News (fair and balanced, as usual). In this modern world, every merchant of death would prefer to remain shadowed. But now Blackwater is trapped. Congress is clamping down, and Baghdad may shut off their link for several decades, if not forever. In an ironic twist, the very same group that the State Department called in to secure Iraq may do so only in its departure, a departure which would be celebrated across the world as the merchants of death leave the largest battleground of the decade.
From the mind of Eamon Driscoll
Sources:
1: Blackwater USA
2: Wall Street Journal 18.Sep.2007
3: Associated Press 22.Sep.2007
4: New York Times 23.Sep.2007
