The Mercenary Revolution: Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military
Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities.

By Jeremy Scahill From the August 15,2007 issue of The Indypendent

http://www.indypendent.org/?p=1230

hiredguns

By Jeremy Scahill

If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.

With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the
Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation
through the use of private war companies.

There are now almost 200,000 private "contractors" deployed in Iraq by
Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outsized by
a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go largely unmonitored and
whose crimes are virtually unpunished.

In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can be
used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely
profitable for a few unaccountable private companies.

Since the launch of the "global war on terror," the administration has
systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to corporations
like Blackwater USA , DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and ArmorGroup. They
have in turn used their lucrative government pay-outs to build up the
infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful that they rival or
outgun some nation's militaries.

"I think it's extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource
its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its
foreign policy or national security objectives," says veteran U.S. Diplomat
Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the 1991
Gulf War.

The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson argues,
"makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body
politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will
arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?"

Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is nearly
impossible to obtain -- by both journalists and elected officials--but some
in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the
war goes to corporate war contractors. At present, the United States spends
about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.

While much has been made of the Bush administration's "failure" to build
international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, perhaps that was never the
intention. When U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with
them the largest army of "private contractors" ever deployed in a war. The
White House substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts
and a coalition of willing nations who provided token forces with a
coalition of billing corporations that supplied the brigades of contractors.

'THERE'S NO DEMOCRATIC CONTROL'

During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was
about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S. forces in
Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies
working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of some 180,000 individual
personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors
surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops.

In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel occupying
Iraq, not including allied nations' militaries. The statistics on
contractors do not account for all armed contractors. Last year, a U.S.
government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than
170 private military companies in Iraq. "It masks the true level of American
involvement," says Ambassador Wilson.

How much money is being spent just on mercenaries remains largely
classified. Congressional sources estimate the United States has spent at
least $6 billion in Iraq, while Britain has spent some $400 million. At the
same time, companies chosen by the White House for rebuilding projects in
Iraq have spent huge sums in reconstruction funds -- possibly billions on
more mercenaries to guard their personnel and projects.

The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a $293
million payment to the British firm Aegis Defence Services, headed by
retired British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who has been dogged by accusations that
he is a mercenary because of his private involvement in African conflicts.
The Texas-based DynCorp International has been another big winner, with more
than $1 billion in contracts to provide personnel to train Iraqi police
forces, while Blackwater USA has won $750 million in State Department
contracts alone for "diplomatic security."

At present, an American or a British Special Forces veteran working for a
private security company in Iraq can make $650 a day. At times the rate has
reached $1,000 a day; the pay dwarfs many times over that of active duty
troops operating in the war zone wearing a U.S. or U.K. flag on their
shoulder instead of a corporate logo.

"We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making
more than the Secretary of Defense," House Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) recently remarked. "How in the
hell do you justify that?" In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that
traditionally have been performed by soldiers. Some require no military
training, but involve deadly occupations, such as driving trucks through
insurgent-controlled territory.

Others are more innocuous, like cooking food or doing laundry on a base, but
still court grave risk because of regular mortar and rocket attacks.

These services are provided through companies like KBR and Fluor and through
their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But many other private personnel are
also engaged in armed combat and "security" operations. They interrogate
prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition flights, protect senior
occupation officials and, in at least one case, have commanded U.S. and
international troops in battle.

In a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush's
troop "surge," said earlier this year that he has, at times, been guarded in
Iraq by "contract security." At least three U.S. commanding generals, not
including Petraeus, are currently being guarded in Iraq by hired guns. "To
have half of your army be contractors, I don't know that there's a precedent
for that," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a member of the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating war
contractors.

"Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American
Revolution. Maybe that's the last time and needless to say, they lost. But
I'm thinking that there's no democratic control and there's no intention to
have democratic control here."

The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, "In the absence of
international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a
coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced: those
who benefited financially from their involvement, those who benefited
politically from their involvement and those few who determined that their
relationship with the United States was more important than their
relationship with anybody else. And that's a real problem because there is
no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this
action that we've taken."

Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to rely on
its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft,
which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable.

'AN ARM OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'

During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January, Petraeus
praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate for an
overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined with Bush's
official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces
give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission."

Taken together with Petraeus's recent assertion that the surge would run
into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other private
forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable future.

"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say
'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight -- it just takes money
and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, whose organization has sued private contractors for
alleged human rights violations in Iraq.

"To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is
resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement,
foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist
wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on
retaining its declining empire. Think about Rome and its increasing need for
mercenaries."

Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments. Their
casualties go uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and their crimes
unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there is no effective
system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their
operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian being
applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts
martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S.
civilian courts. And no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be
prosecuted in Iraqi courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority
granted them complete immunity.

"These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its
policies," argues Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S.
contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity.
There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their
activities are."

That raises the crucial question: what exactly are they doing in Iraq in the
name of the U.S. and U.K. governments? Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a
leading member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which is
responsible for reviewing sensitive national security issues, explained the
difficulty of monitoring private military companies on the U.S. payroll: "If
I want to see a contract, I have to go up to a secret room and look at it,
can't take any notes, can't take any notes out with me, you know --
essentially, I don't have access to those contracts and even if I did, I
couldn't tell anybody about it."

'A MARKETPLACE FOR WARFARE'

On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what appear to
be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much to the
embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and the tens of
thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two individuals have
been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow
contractor, while the other pled guilty to possessing child-pornography
images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.

Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on
murder-related charges alone -- but not a single armed contractor has been
prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors
were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their
companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here
today, stays here today." International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated
a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a creeping threat to global
order.

"To outsource security-related, military related issues to non-government,
non-military forces is a source of great concern and it caught many
governments unprepared," says Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran U.N.
diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission before the U.S.
invasion.

In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build up
armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with the
promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay. That the
home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed to the war
itself is of little consequence.

"Have gun, will fight for paycheck" has become a globalized law.

"The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside parliamentary
control. They come from all over and they are answerable to no one except a
very narrow group of people and they come from countries whose governments
may not even know in detail that they have actually been contracted as a
private army into a war zone," says von Sponeck.

"If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather
than a political issue involving a debate in the countries.

You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not this
should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and shape. It's a
very worrying new aspect of international relations. I think it becomes more
and more uncontrollable by the countries of supply."

In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been deployed by
U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that
Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council, opposed the
invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the
Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.

"There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between politics
and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about the
privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries," says
Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was
tortured under Pinochet's regime.

"This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs --
third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the
developed world -- and maximize benefits. In other words, let others fight
the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at
all."

NEW WORLD DISORDER

The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the
world's poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and
use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the
conquering power to hold down domestic casualties -- the single-greatest
impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than
1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with
another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers
are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are
increasingly disturbed by casualties.

In Iraq, many companies are run by Americans or Britons and have
well-trained forces drawn from elite military units for use in sensitive
actions or operations. But down the ranks, these forces are filled by Iraqis
and third-country nationals. Indeed, some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000
contractors are Iraqis, and many mercenaries are reportedly ill-paid, poorly
equipped and barely trained Iraqi nationals.

The mercenary industry points to this as a positive: we are giving Iraqis
jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a private
corporation hired by a hostile invading power.

Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian named mercenary trade group, the
International Peace Operations Association, argued from early on in the
occupation, "Museums do not need to be guarded by Abrams tanks when an Iraqi
security guard working for a contractor can do the same job for less than
one-fiftieth of what it costs to maintain an American soldier. Hiring local
guards gives Iraqis a stake in a successful future for their country. They
use their pay to support their families and stimulate the economy. Perhaps
most significantly, every guard means one less potential guerrilla."

In many ways, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor in
destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The giant
multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring locals,
even if it's at starvation wages.

"Donald Rumsfeld's masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to bring
the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of the most
powerful military in the world," says Naomi Klein, whose upcoming book, The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes.

"We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with so-called
hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military technology and
design in rich countries while the manual labor and sweat work of invasion
and occupation is increasingly outsourced to contractors who compete with
each other to fill the work order for the lowest price. Just as this model
breeds rampant abuse in the manufacturing sector -- with the big-name brands
always able to plead ignorance about the actions of their suppliers--so it
does in the military, though with stakes that are immeasurably higher." In
the case of Iraq, the U.S. and U.K. governments could give the public
perception of a withdrawal of forces and just privatize the occupation.
Indeed, shortly after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced
that he wanted to withdraw 1,600 soldiers from Basra, reports emerged that
the British government was considering sending in private security companies
to "fill the gap left behind."

THE SPY WHO BILLED ME

While Iraq currently dominates the headlines, private war and intelligence
companies are expanding their already sizable footprint. The U.S. government
in particular is now in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda
in its history. According to a recent report in Vanity Fair, the government
pays contractors as much as the combined taxes paid by everyone in the
United States with incomes under $100,000, meaning "more than 90 percent of
all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to
[contractors] rather than to the [government]."

Some of this outsourcing is happening in sensitive sectors, including the
intelligence community. "This is the magnet now. Everything is being
attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise
and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community," says
former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. "My major
concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The
entire industry is essentially out of control. It's outrageous."

RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private
contractors and U.S. intelligence, recently obtained documents from the
Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that
Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence
contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently that spending
represents 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to private
companies.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that the current head of the DNI is Mike
McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National
Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry's lobbying arm.
Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence
documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is prepared in part by private
companies, despite having the official seal of the U.S. intelligence
apparatus.

"Let's say a company is frustrated with a government that's hampering its
business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning
intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with terrorists
would quickly get the White House's attention and could be used to shape
national policy," Hillhouse argues.

MUTLINATIONAL MERCENARIES

Empowered by their new found prominence, mercenary forces are increasing
their presence on other battlefields: in Latin America, DynCorp
International is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries under
the guise of the "war on drugs" -- U.S. defense contractors are receiving
nearly half the $630 million in U.S. military aid for Colombia; in Africa,
mercenaries are deploying in Somalia, Congo and Sudan and increasingly have
their sights set on tapping into the hefty U.N. peacekeeping budget (this
has been true since at least the early 1990s and probably much earlier).
Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, while proposals are being considered to privatize the
U.S. border patrol.

Brooks, the private military industry lobbyist, says people should not
become "overly obsessed with Iraq," saying his association's "member
companies have more personnel working in U.N. and African Union peace
operations than all but a handful of countries." Von Sponeck says he
believes the use of such companies in warfare should be barred and has harsh
words for the institution for which he spent his career working: "The United
Nations, including the U.N. Secretary General, should react to this and
instead of reacting, they are mute, they are silent."

This unprecedented funding of such enterprises, primarily by the U.S. and
U.K. governments, means that powers once the exclusive realm of nations are
now in the hands of private companies with loyalty only to profits, CEOs
and, in the case of public companies, shareholders. And, of course, their
client, whoever that may be. CIA-type services, special operations, covert
actions and small-scale military and paramilitary forces are now on the
world market in a way not seen in modern history. This could allow
corporations or nations with cash to spend but no real military power to
hire squadrons of heavily armed and well-trained commandos.

"It raises very important issues about state and about the very power of
state. The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of the
government -- wholly run and owned by -- is the use of military power," says
Rep. Jan Schakowsky. "Suddenly you've got a for-profit corporation going
around the world that is more powerful than states, can effect regime
possibly where they may want to go, that seems to have all the support that
it needs from this administration that is also pretty adventurous around the
world and operating under the cover of darkness.

"It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who influences
policy around the globe, about relationships among some countries. Maybe
it's their goal to render state coalitions like NATO irrelevant in the
future, that they'll be the ones and open to the highest bidder. Who really
does determine war and peace around the world?"