The Outsource Outsources

Not terribly surprising when I stop & think about it, but what I read about Blackwater USA today frightened me. It's old news that they provide paramilitary services so we can keep a draft at bay and that those services are provided outside the boundaries of the Geneva Conventions (whichever ones the Bush administration still observes, anyway). What Mother Jones reports, though, is that Blackwater is skimping on the $10K/month they usually pay an US civilian to play shoot-em-up in Iraq. Why pay that kind of money when you can get a Chilean--not some rifle-toting peasant, mind you, but a formally trained commando--to do the job for $1K/month? Let's let the market decide:

"As profit margins in the private security industry have narrowed—Blackwater clears just 10 percent on its primary State Department contract, [Blackwater CEO Erik] Prince testified—the CEO has increasingly looked beyond American shores. More and more of his foot soldiers now come from Third World countries, and his corporate network is aggressively pitching for business from foreign governments."

The nativists might actually see this (if Fox news deigned to report it) and be outraged that swarthy foreign operatives might be lying in wait to undermine our military efforts. And undermine they might, cause you can bet your ass that some of these "professional commandos" are practiced in the arts of human rights violations. But they'll probably fit right in with their Blackwater cohorts, and anyway I'm not inclined to worry much about their nationality. Facts is facts: a hired gun is a hired gun.

Let's just set aside the casual approach with which most media and the vast majority of Americans approach contracting out our military services--not to mention the casual avoidance of thought about the war itself. Are we really going to send people to work, fight, and die in Iraq for $34/day? That is, by the way, less than a grad student makes per year at UF, and grad students here are poor enough. When will people wake up to the fact that this war is openly an experiment in predatory neoliberalism and that we've got to put a stop to both? What will it take for our fellow voters come to that realization--to draft our youth to fight alongside Chilean Blackwater ops?

And anyway, if Blackwater is laying plans to stick around for a while, what will they do if and when the US leaves Iraq and terminates that contract with them? Prince says he's looking to get into the peace-keeping business, and he soothes naysayers by promising that he won't contract with hostile foreign governments. After all, doing so would imperil his US business relations. But how else might an idle private army occupy itself? Strike breaking? Dissenter intimidation?

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Update: A 5 June 2008 piece in The Nation reports that Blackwater has received a contract with the Pentagon's Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office to fight drug trade-related terrorists and especially to train counternarcotics police in Afghanistan. Working for the imbroglio against drugs could be Blackwater's biggest job ever. Moreover, Blackwater is eying "a move into the world of privatized intelligence services" for Fortune 500 companies, offering "'surveillance and countersurveillance, deployed intelligence collection, and rapid safeguarding of employees or other key assets'". Impressive.