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Defending Blackwater and Understanding the Western Way of War

Nicholas M. Guariglia - 10/2/2007

Judging from the reactions of fellow diplomacy students, one may have fallen under the impression I was justifying Jeffrey Dahmer’s eating habits. Regardless, I am coming to believe something is apparently very wrong with me, in that I feel private military companies (PMCs) –– particularly Blackwater USA –– are amongst the most efficient humanitarian organizations in business.

Just why the hysteria over the ascendance of private security corporations? Some of the gripes are irreconcilable with each other. To simultaneously claim, for instance, that such contractors are both villains (“mercenaries”) and victims of unaccountable employers is disingenuous and incompatible.

To weave in and out of applying intentionalist ethics –– questioning the motives of the employed –– and consequentialist standards –– questioning their performance –– is likewise inconsistent. (As if one would be inclined to favor something one adamantly opposes in principle if only it were conducted more competently.) I think it is safe to say most of us are above this mode of argument.

For the purposes of this short piece, I cannot afford to expand as much as I would prefer. So let me be precise: private contractors abroad supply everything from food to showerheads to big-screens for their host militaries. They train natives, secure refineries, defend grids, protect envoys, and safeguard the elected parliamentarians of the indigenous. And yes, they bring in the bucks.
But are these chastised “war profiteers” any more or less amoral than, say, a cardiologist which addresses, and thus profits from, the treatment of heart disease? Or a clean-up conglomerate which rebuilds towns devastated by natural disaster? Is not the continuity of disease, plight, and disaster in the financial interest of these parties? Why would a war theater be an exception to the rule, the one realm in which this code of conduct does not apply?

When do-gooders speak surprisingly that corporations, providing a needed service through the selling of that service, actually ascertain revenue –– Oh no! –– thereby continuing to provide that service, it is an odd criticism of something that need not be criticized. It recalls the old Marxist fib that suggests history is only the tale of calculated material pursuit, not the narrative of human emotion, pride, fear, and irrationalism.

One could think of PMCs as NGOs on steroids. But ignore this Strangelovian analogy for a moment. Out of the 129,000 contractors in Iraq alone –– comprising some 28 different companies and multiple nationalities –– only 4,600 serve in defensive combat roles (an estimated 990 of which are Blackwater employees). No, they are not bound by the traditional Uniform Code of Military Justice. The State Department writes their checks, they collude militarily with Central Command and the Pentagon, and it is the Iraqi interior ministry –– under CPA Memorandum 17, approved by three successive Iraqi cabinets –– to which they are legally bound.

Their performance speaks for itself. After an enraged Salafi mob hacked four Blackwater agents to bits, hanging their limbs from a Fallujah bridge, a half-dozen contractors proved their grit a week later in Najaf by defending the Coalition Authority’s headquarters, authoritatively mowing down hundreds of mask-clad Sadrist militiamen. (Appropriately enough, the exhibition occurred near the world’s largest cemetery.)

The Najaf scuffle exemplified the kind of professionalism one would expect from former Army Rangers, as well as Navy SEAL and Green Beret commandos. Even Blackwater’s most ardent critics have trouble denying its tactical prowess and cost-efficiency; author and counterinsurgency expert Thomas X. Hammes, a vocal opponent of the company, has referred to Blackwater as “an extraordinarily professional organization, and they (do) exactly what they (are) tasked to do.”

And yet, after another supposedly obtrusive Blackwater firefight, it seems the Iraqi parliament is weighing its option to eject the firm from the war zone. Is this not the apex of legitimate accountability –– permitting the indigenous to consensually fire whom we hire? (Do not bet on this outcome, though. The Iraqi parliamentarians are wisely coming to concur that expelling their bodyguards may be imprudent at this hour.)

The intricacies of legal loopholes that PMCs present to us are nothing diplomacy students (of all people) should avoid. But the paroxysmal hemicrania should stop. Worry-warting over each PMC transgression is like requesting the banishment of the AMA for each failed surgery, or tarnishing FedEx’s reputation for a singular late arrival. When a drunken contactor shot and killed Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s personal protector, he was fired and flown to the U.S. for trial.

Contrast this self-audit and radical regulatory oversight –– under the auspices of the host state, mind you –– with the slew of U.N. “peacekeeping” scandals (sexual abuse, rape, etc.) in places like Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

Hired security firms, on the other hand, have made short work of insurrectionists in Sierra Leone, ensuring their first free elections in a decade; they have assisted the Angolan military to quell a seemingly endless insurgency; and they have come to the aid of Croatians to stop Serbian butchery in its tracks.

This is simply the Western way of war, dating back 2,500 years. Upheld practices –– not race, geography, or technology –– explain why minuscule Greece vanquished Persia; why German and Spanish mercenaries saved Europe at Vienna; why we study Rome, not Hannibal; why gunpowder was a rarity for the privileged Chinese but became an accessible tool for adaptive (and parasitic) Western citizenry; why the hypothesis of an elderly Lockheed Martin employee is more dangerous than the jihadists’ IEDs and pajama-donning movie productions.

Blackwater and similar PMCs represent an industrial defense capacity which has repeatedly saved the United States since our inception. Had Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR, a former subsidiary of that other evil corporation, Halliburton) not constructed twenty fluid catalytic units or a gaseous diffusion plant, World War II may have lasted well into the 1950s.

What is the military other than a proficient institution which outsources its investigative research responsibilities to profit-making corporations? And while Western military power alone is not a sufficient barometer of morality, it is a lucid indicator of a more egalitarian system that transforms private ingenuity into public necessity; a system that champions creed over color, innovation and introspection over archaic tradition, and secular inquiry over needless religious ritual.

This is just what we do. It works.