http://hnn.us/articles/4860.htmlThe men of Custer Battles guard Baghdad's airport, while the men of Blackwater USA -- if still waters run deep, how do blackwaters run, and where do they get these names? -- four of whom were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, provide the fulltime security team of ten guarding our "administrator" in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and various members of the Iraqi Governing Council. They are part of a new word and world order taking disheveled shape in what may indeed become the "killing fields" of Iraq, an order that we have no reasonable language whatsoever to describe. snip
This is what passes for "security" thinking in America just as companies like Custer Battles, Dyncorp, and Blackwater USA pass for "security firms." Such thinking -- and the language that goes with it -- is part and parcel of the creation of what should perhaps be called a National Insecurity State itself teetering atop an Insecurity Planet. snip
With that in mind, let's consider a few of the key terms that both in government pronouncements and in media coverage of Iraq add up to the bubble language that stands between Americans and a reasonable perception of the world out there:
"Security firms": It's in the nature of human beings, when they take marginal activities and bring them into the mainstream to want to professionalize them and so upgrade their status. Once upon a time, there were scattered "soldiers of fortune" and "mercenaries" in our world, former soldiers or wannabe soldiers who, as in Southern Africa in the 1980s, sold themselves to any bidder and shouldered arms for various, largely right-wing regimes. Now, this seat-of-the-pants mercenary business has become a $100 billion dollar global operation (with the U.S. government as its largest employer) and you can search our press far and wide rarely coming across the terms "mercenary," "soldier of fortune," "hired guns," "rent-a-cops," or anything else that might bring us closer to the tawdry reality of what these so-called security companies are actually selling. The employees of these firms are in turn usually called "contractors" in our press -- which sounds like such an up-and-up, modest, business-like thing to be -- even when they're heavily armed and out in the field fighting Iraqis. Of course, the basic "gap" here lies in the very word "security." You simply can't have a more "secure" world in which such firms can freely make multimillions of dollars by hiring out to the highest -- and most powerful -- bidders. snip
The men of Blackwater and Custer Battles now find themselves at war and, as O'Neill reports, often can't even call on the U.S. military for backup when attacked. As a result, the various, otherwise competitive private outfits in Iraq are beginning to band together -- with their own helicopter support teams and their own intelligence -- to defend themselves more effectively. The Bush administration has for months now been hyping the infiltration of dangerous and unscrupulous "foreign fighters" into Iraq. As it happens they've been right. According to Brookings Institute expert Peter W. Singer, "We're talking somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 private personnel, and that is expected to rise to 30,000 when the coalition hands over power to Iraqis on 30 June." These men, living in their own Wild West, are, for some Iraqis, "the most hated and humiliating aspect" of an occupation which probably couldn't continue without them.
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