Those seeking to pinpoint the date
that propelled the private military firm Blackwater into its prominent (and disastrous) position in the U.S. military apparatus
might look toward Sept. 11, 2001. Al Clark, one of the company’s co-founders, once remarked, “Osama bin Laden
turned Blackwater into what it is today.” And two weeks after 9/11, Erik Prince, the company’s other co-founder
and current CEO, told Bill O’Reilly that, after four years in the business, “I was starting to get a little cynical
on how seriously people took security. The phone is ringing off the hook now.”
However, in her new book, The
Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein suggests that we should turn the calendar back one day and read the speech that then-Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon staffers on Sept. 10, 2001. The day before 19 hijackers flw passenger flights into
the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Rumsfeld darkly warned of “a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United
States of America. … With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense
of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Who was this dastardly adversary? “[T]he Pentagon bureaucracy.”
Declaring “an all-out campaign
to shift the Pentagon’s resources from bureaucracy to battlefield, from tail to the tooth,” Rumsfeld told his
staff to “scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing.”
He mentioned healthcare, housing and custodial work, and said that, outside of “warfighting,” “we should
seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively.”
As Jeremy Scahill has reported, the
implementation of that plan has been wildly successful, with at least 180,000 private
contractors currently employed in Iraq, outnumbering U.S. troops by 20,000, even after the “surge.” (In the first
Gulf war, the soldier-to-contractor ratio was 60:1.) But the results have been disastrous, from the deplorable conditions
at the recently privatized Walter Reed military hospital, to the contaminated
food and fecal-soiled bathing water that Halliburton provided to U.S. troops, to the gung-ho Blackwater contractors who prefer
to shoot Iraqi hearts rather than win them.
This outsourcing of the military’s
core services is in keeping with the Bush administration’s philosophy of government. New York Times columnist
Paul Krugman noted that we’ve seen the same dynamic at work in the IRS, with
the agency outsourcing debt collection of back taxes to private companies, which then receive a share of the return for
their work.
But to lay the blame solely at the
feet of the Bush administration is to overlook the complicity of Democrats in accepting
a neoliberal agenda that has gutted government services and redistributed its wealth into the hands of private interests.
After all, the Clinton administration first expanded the use of military contractors, deploying them in the Balkans, Somalia,
Haiti and Colombia.
In fact, in late September, as the
most recent Blackwater massacres started to gain mainstream press attention, hundreds of corporate luminaries joined Bill
Clinton in New York City to extol the charitable efforts of the Clinton Global Initiative. The former president said his humanitarian
endeavor is needed to tackle education, poverty and global warming because these are issues the “government won’t
solve, or that government alone can’t solve.”
That might be true, but only because
we’ve undergone 30 years of a political ideology that has robbed government of needed revenues, derided regulation that
might impinge on corporate profits and sneered at the idea that a public spirit could be preferable to private motives. Rather
than rely on the charity of those who have so handsomely profited, it’s time we alter the perverse arrangement.
{Why there aren’t figures on what
Blackwater earns in Iraq and what the US
government is charge per man per day)
According to former Blackwater officials, Blackwater, Regency and ESS were engaged in
a classic war-profiteering scheme. Blackwater was paying its men $600 a day but billing Regency $815, according to the Raleigh
News and Observer. "In addition," the paper reports, "Blackwater billed Regency separately for all its overhead and costs
in Iraq." Regency would then bill ESS an unknown amount for these services.
Kathy Potter told the News and Observer that Regency would "quote ESS a price, say $1,500 per man per day, and then
tell Blackwater that it had quoted ESS $1,200." ESS then contracted with Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which in turn billed
the government an unknown amount of money for the same security services, according to the paper. KBR/Halliburton refuses
to discuss the matter and will not confirm any relationship with ESS.
