Mercenaries and the Markets

Mercenaries and the Markets

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 2007, security guards employed by Blackwater, a now-famous American security contractor—one of a class of businesses known in modern parlance as PMFs, or privatized military firms—killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad and wounded another twenty-four. The New York Times subsequently reported that since 2005 Blackwater employees had fired weapons in Iraq on one hundred and ninety-five occasions, and an ongoing FBI investigation has so far determined that at least fourteen of the September killings were wholly unjustified. Blackwater is probably the only PMF most Americans can name; its celebrity springs from both the recent scandal and from an incident predating the September massacre. At the end of March 2004, four of its employees were murdered, mutilated, dismembered, burned, and suspended from a bridge in Fallujah, in an eerily protracted rite that triggered the first round of major combat in that city. For a couple of months at the end of 2007 Blackwater became emblematic of a trend worth following: the remarkable increase in private sector military firms since the early 1990s. With the eclipse of the war in Iraq by the troubles of the housing and credit markets, Blackwater and the phenomena it has been taken to represent are receding from public view, which is regrettable, because the recent and vertiginous rise of PMFs richly deserves increased attention.

Jeremy Scahill, a regular contributor to the Nation, is author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, one of the few books on PMFs you can buy in a chain bookstore, and certainly the only one with a cover noting that it is “A New York Times Bestseller.” Scahill thinks that a few of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks on September 10, 2001, urging a Pentagon managerial model based on the alleged virtues of the private sector, “opened the door for one of the most significant developments in modern warfare—the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, ...