Iraq’s Mercenaries - With A Licence To Kill

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/04/1651/

Iraq’s Mercenaries - With A Licence To Kill
‘These private contractors can get away with murder… They aren’t subject to any laws at all’
by Johann Hari


snip//

Last year, Representative Dennis Kucinich asked Pentagon officials at a Senate hearing if the US Department of Defence would prosecute a private contractor who murdered Iraqi civilians. After being told repeatedly, “Sir, I can’t answer that question,” Kucinich said: “Wow. Think about what that means. These private contractors can get away with murder… They aren’t subject to any laws at all.”

How did this happen? How did Iraq become flooded with private militia making a killing? The story begins back in the early 1990s, when Dick Cheney was secretary of state for defence. He believed Pentagon “bureaucracy” was mere Big Government and had to be smashed into a thousand corporate pieces to be made “efficient”. Cheney’s proposals continued at a slow pace during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who brought mercenaries into the Balkans - then went into over-drive when he was Vice President.

The US right has a slew of reasons to privatise the US military so rapidly. The most obvious is simple corruption. It funnels money to companies in which they have a huge stake, and who in turn donate a fortune to the Republican Party. This is justified in public by a market fundamentalist conviction that governments can never run anything properly, so their functions must always be sold off.

But this is a secondary motive. The main limit on an aggressive US foreign policy today is the limited number of US citizens who are prepared to kill and die for it. Mercenaries solve the problem: just buy troops in. The public is far less likely to protest against a war if the victims are hardened Colombians in it for the cash, rather than their cousin from Wisconsin who signed up out of patriotism. In mercenary wars, all citizens are asked to give is money, not blood. The Cheney model of mercenary warfare being tried out in Iraq is, in fact, a way of making possible his vision of a 21st century in which wars for resources will be “necessary” on a “regular basis”.

We have been here before. In his Discourses, Niccolo Machiavelli describes how, in its dying days, the Roman Empire was no longer able to inspire a large citizen-militia, and increasingly bought armies of willing foreigners. The result was dissolution, decadence and imperial collapse. What would the world look like if Cheney’s vision of privatised armies prevailed in this century? There would be far more wars, far less checked by the rules of war built up after the nightmare of the 1940s: in other words, more Iraqs.

snip//

Dick Cheney effectively believes in rule by corporations, rather than rule by the state, so for him, this is a comforting vision. For the rest of us, the seizure of British mercenaries in Baghdad provides us with a glimpse of a future where we are stumbling unwittingly on to corporate battlefield with no end. The Iraqis are living - and dying - in this dystopia today.

[EFerrari]

1. This is coming home. Duncan Hunter and others plus a high ranking

official in Arnold's administration are trying to open Blackwater West in CA.

They want to "respond" to earthquakes.

Over my f%cking dead body.

:nuke:

[PDJane]

2. This is the part of privatization that I find ugly.

Privatize jails, and you get corporations pushing for harsher punishments, mandatory terms, and work for prisoners, effectively making a slave labour class.

Privatize health care, and you get the people who most need health care being uninsurable, people being denied coverage for specific ailments, and a huge expense.

Privatize the military, and you get a mercenary army, who will do what they wish to do without fear of punishment, as long as they are paid. It's a horrendously expensive way to wage a series of essentially private wars, and a fine way to head to fascism.

Privatize water supply, and people who can't afford it don't get to drink. Privatize electricity, and old folks and children die in the cold or the heat.

Add to this that the middle class disappears, and one gets a hugely wealthy 2%.......and the rest of the world. In order to keep the money flowing to that 2%, one then gets fascism, because you can't make the world safe for the moneymakers and keep a thriving democracy at home.

[Demeter]

3. If Iraq Ever Becomes Functional Again, I Bet They Could Prosecute For Murder

ANOTHER reason why BushCo doesn't want Iraq to reform as a functional country.