Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The New
Merchants of Death
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Sunday, February 5, 2017
ROAR Magazine
In August
2016, the Pentagon announced that Six3 Intelligence Solutions, a private
intelligence company recently acquired by California Analysis Center
Incorporated (CACI), which was implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal, had won a
$10 million no-bid army contract to provide intelligence analysis services
inside Syria. They were to work alongside the roughly three hundred US troops
fighting against the so-called Islamic State and to depose Russian-backed
Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad.
Hiring a
company with as checkered a record as CACI is bound to ignite a backlash
against US interference within Syria, and may empower the very forces the US is
fighting. The logic underlying the use of private military contractors (PMCs),
however, and American foreign policy in the Middle East more broadly, is not a
rational one. It is shaped by a political structure beholden to corporate
interests who see opportunity in political instability and endless war. CACI’s
executive board includes a former CIA Deputy Director and head of its
clandestine services after 9/11, a Lockheed executive, and a commander of army
training doctrine and command. The company spends over $200,000 annually on
lobbying, giving over $94,000 in campaign contributions to Super PACs this
election cycle as of September, according to OpenSecrets.org, and $162,021 in
2012 (85 percent of it to Republicans).
CACI
embodies two trends that have gravely hindered democratic political development
in the United States over the last generation: an incestuous relationship
between military contractors and government officials who end up serving on the
executive boards of companies they dole out lucrative contracts to; and the
ability of the same companies to finance political campaigns, which curries
them favor alongside their lobbying efforts. These tendencies have helped to
entrench a system of military-Keynesianism and resulted in an irrational
foreign policy that fuels the global political instability that politically
connected companies profit from.
Historical
Roots and Political Utility
Mercenaries
have long been part of American war making, employed particularly to carry out covert
operations the public may not have been keen to support. During the Cold War,
General Clare Chennault set up a private airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), to
ferry supplies to proxy armies fighting on the front-lines against communism,
and companies like DynCorp International and Vinnell Corporation, which later
came to play a prominent role in the Global War on Terror, built military
bases, performed combat support roles and helped to run black operations.
The Vietnam
War was a turning point in modern American history when the consensus in favor
of military intervention began to wane. As a result of pressure by a sizeable
antiwar movement, the US government was forced to abolish the draft. Policy
planners in Washington and the interests associated with the so-called military
industrial complex, however, were bent on sustaining US military hegemony. They
championed high-tech weapons systems including remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs,
or drones) as a substitute for boots on the ground, and pushed for the
subcontracting of counterinsurgency to strategic allies. At a time when
corporate power was becoming more entrenched, private military contractors were
greatly valued as a means of distancing military intervention from the public
and keeping a light American military footprint to prevent a reawakening of the
antiwar movement.
A
particularly controversial aspect of US foreign policy in the 1970s was support
for the Saudi Royal family, which provided the US access to cheap oil at a time
when the OPEC embargo had raised global prices, and demanded payment for all
its oil sales in American dollars. In return, the Nixon administration and its
successors agreed to provide for internal security by arming and training the
National Guard. They hired Vinnell Corporation, which in 1979 provided the
tactical support needed by the Saudi Princes to put down a leftist rebellion
and recapture the Grand Mosque at Mecca.
In 1981,
Executive Order 12333 gave US intelligence agencies the right to enter into
contracts with private companies for authorized intelligence purposes, which
need not be disclosed. This provided a basis for some of the arms smuggling
operations using private airlines in the Contra war in Nicaragua. The 1990s was
a key growth period for the private military industry because of factors that
included the waning of public support for military intervention following the
end of the Cold War, a proliferation of ethnic conflicts that the United
Nations and United States were seemingly incapable of dealing with, and the
growth of corporate lobbying power in an age of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism
in theory, as political economist David Harvey has noted, proposed that human
wellbeing could best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
property rights, free markets and free trade. The main goal of the state in
this system is secure property rights and the proper functioning of markets. In
practice, however, neoliberalism has transferred power from public to private
hands, hence eroding democratic standards and resulting in the entrenchment of
corporate power. It has intensified inequality and suppressed labor rights and
been accompanied by systematic state repression, epitomized in the United
States by the intensification of the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration
state.
The
privatization of law enforcement and military functions is an important
manifestation of neoliberalism, which embodies how, as Ian Bruff puts it in his
introductory essay, “the intertwining of commercial and security forms of power
leads to considerably greater possibilities for control of populations.” The
reason centers in part on a lack of public transparency and capacity for proper
regulations and oversight of private corporations and their use of coercive
force and social control technologies as they become one with the government.
There is also new opportunity to manipulate public opinion to further private
interest centered on maximizing profit at the expense of human consideration.
States like
the US have traditionally deployed their repressive powers against political
undesirables who threaten elite privilege either at home or abroad.
However,
these efforts have at times been constrained by international and domestic
legal considerations and domestic constituencies valuing civil liberties, peace
and human rights. As governments gradually became more beholden to private
interests in the neoliberal era, such constraints have increasingly been lifted
as citizens are asked to bear less sacrifice, and have less of a stake and even
knowledge of what their government is doing abroad. Citizens at the same time
may be conditioned to care only about the individual accumulation of wealth,
leading to the further erosion of civic consciousness and prospects for
engagement with social movements.
The Global
War on Terror as a Super Bowl for PMCS
From 1994
to 2002, the Pentagon signed more than 3,000 contracts with US-based firms
valued at $300 billion. These totals increased following the declaration of the
Global War on Terror (GWOT), which was considered the “Super Bowl” for PMCs
that had made over $100 billion in Iraq alone by 2008.
Upon his
appointment as defense secretary by President George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld had
set about reducing the wasteful Pentagon bureaucracy and revolutionizing the US
armed forces by moving towards a lighter, more flexible fighting machine and
harnessing private sector power on multiple fronts. He wrote in Foreign
Affairs that “we must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one
that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like
bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists.”
As
resistance to US occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq intensified, the military
became overstretched and, in the absence of a draft, began lowering its
recruitment standards to include ex-criminals and even neo-Nazis. A number of
soldiers refused redeployment for second and third tours. Private contractors
filled an important void, performing key military functions such as protecting
diplomats, transporting supplies, training police and army personnel, guarding
checkpoints and other strategic facilities including oil installations,
providing intelligence, helping to rescue wounded personnel, dismantling IEDs,
carrying out interrogation and even loading bombs onto CIA drones. A British
mercenary pointed out that military commanders “do not like us, [but] tolerate
us as a necessary evil because they know that if it wasn’t for us, they would need
another 25,000 to 50,000 troops on the ground here.” And politically, after
Vietnam, this was impossible to arrange.
At various
points in the 15-year war in Afghanistan, the number of military contractors
actually outnumbered US troops. As of April 2016, there were at least 30,000
private contractors still there. There are also approximately 7,100 contractors
currently supporting US government operations in Iraq, doing jobs from washing
laundry and providing security on bases to training police and military
officers to advising the Kurdish regional government in Erbil and the Iraqi
government in Baghdad. Some of the money comes from a reported $52 billion CIA
black budget disclosed in 2013 by Edward Snowden.
Shawn
McFate, author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They
Mean for World Order, told the Daily Beast that
“contractors encourage mission creep because they allow the administration to
put more people on the ground than they report to the American people.” They
also enable executive secrecy by performing covert operations the American
public may not support, like aspects of the drone war they are involved with
and the smuggling of arms to the rebels in Syria purchased from al Qaeda
militia leaders in Libya.
Representatives
from PMCs at the same time often play an instrumental role in manipulating
public opinion by selling wars they profit off. Since 2001, former four-star
General Barry McCaffrey has been a military analyst at NBC News where he has
often supported American military interventions. McCaffrey also happens to
serve on the Board of Directors of DynCorp, which received a billion dollar
contract for training the Afghan and Iraqi national police.
Problems
with Private Military Contractors
Proponents
of PMCs claim that they can offset the weakness of state security forces in
impoverished countries and will operate in areas like West Africa to halt
genocide or other human rights atrocities that national armies will not venture
into. They also claim that PMCs provide more efficient security services,
epitomized in Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s boast about revolutionizing the
industry like FedEx had the mail service.
Congressional
investigations, however, uncovered numerous cases of fraud and dangerously poor
construction by PMCs in Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in the deaths of at
least eighteen troops, including a Green Beret who was electrocuted in a shower
installed by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), whose war contracts totaled $39.5
billion. Over 25,000 soldiers got sick after KBR did not properly chlorinate
the water at Camp Ramadi owing to cost-cutting measures and because they burned
waste in environmentally unsound ways with little oversight. A police-training
academy built by DynCorp was so poorly constructed that urine and feces fell on
its students. These occurrences show the delusions of neoliberals in their
belief in the inviolability of private business, extending to the realm of
security.
A major
danger associated with the privatization of security is that security becomes
the domain of only the wealthy — that is, for those who can pay for it.
PMCs operating in Iraq, for example, were given lucrative contracts to guard
Iraq’s ravaged oil fields, which were opened up to foreign multinationals,
though the Iraqi police force was underfunded and unable to protect the public
from sectarian violence and insurgents. Parallels can be seen in other places
like Latin America, where PMCs guard oil pipelines or mining companies when
public security is generally poor.
A lack of
government oversight and transparency magnifies the capacity for contractor
abuse. DynCorp employees were implicated in illegal arms smuggling and
involvement in the child-sex slave trade in Bosnia and a host of abuses in
Afghanistan including drunken disorderly conduct, torture and hiring teenage
“dancing boys.” In 2007, Blackwater operatives in Nisour Square infamously
killed 17 unarmed civilians, including women and children, and wounded at least
24 in a shooting rampage.
While
atrocities in war are frequent, the propensity was magnified by the fact that
PMCs had legal immunity and were not subject to either Iraqi law or the Uniform
Military Code of Justice, nor the Geneva Conventions. Many companies also did
not follow rigorous recruitment methods or training standards and allowed
employees to take steroids. In addition, there was a culture of militarized
masculinity that appears greater than that of the military itself. One Triple
Canopy employee told a reporter that: “It was like romanticizing the idea of
killing to the point where dudes want to do it… Does that mean you’re not a
real man unless you’ve dropped a guy?” While such comment could be made by
someone in the army, the possibility of court martial there can help constrain
excessive violence.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment