WAR FOR SALE -- CHEAP! Somewhat tarnished but still offers significant profit-making opportunities for the entrepreneurial. Inquire at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. Additional components of U.S. foreign policy also for sale (including, but not limited to, intelligence gathering, humanitarian assistance and counter-terrorism).
You probably haven't seen that ad on Craigslist or in the classified section of your local paper. But believe me, that ad, or something very much like it, has been circulating quietly in certain corporate circles for several years.
Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater USA (which describes itself as "the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping and stability operations company in the world") has seen the ad. So have Jerry Hoffman, CEO of ArmorGroup, and Herb Lanese, CEO of DynCorp. The ad has also made its way to CACI, Haliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, and the rest of the corporations that make money doing the things we used to assume only the U.S. government did -- such as fight our wars, protect our diplomats, interrogate suspected terrorists and engage in nation-building.
This week's fatal Baghdad shooting involving Blackwater employees drew fresh attention to U.S. reliance on private security contractors. (The incident, which sparked angry protests from the Iraqi government, left 11 Iraqis dead.) But despite the renewed controversy, most media coverage of the role of private contractors has focused on relatively mundane issues -- the legal vacuum in which contractors operate in Iraq, for instance -- and missed the true blockbuster story: the wholesale privatization of war and U.S. foreign policy.
When I say that the legal vacuum in which contractors operate is a relatively mundane issue, I don't mean that it's unimportant. It's not. In the absence of clear rules and accountability mechanisms for contractors, abuses -- from waste and fraud to assault, torture and murder -- are inevitable. As an editorial in this paper noted on Wednesday: "The massive, poorly regulated, poorly controlled and even downright secretive outsourcing of key military and security jobs to private contractors has gone too far. Congress is overdue for some oversight." That's right -- but it's a major understatement.
