by Johannes Koch
A hard-left view of private military companies is rare! Jeremy Scahill says it like this; private military companies (PMCs) are:
"Heavily armed military types." Finished.
I just watched an interview with him on The Hour (watch it here if you want), a Canadian current affairs infotainment television journal, and he managed to compress an immensely dense and complicated issue into some very fine (and some awkward) soundbites.
He kicked off by saying that Blackwater - the PMC that he investigated in his most recent release, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" - "has emerged as the praetorian guard of the war on terror". Fine.
Then, "the US failed to build the coalition of the willing to go to Iraq so they built the coalition of the billing instead." Awkward!
Anyway, whilst he was very hardhitting on the rhetoric in the interview he also put forward some facts. He asserted that Blackwater is not sub-contracted by the Pentagon but by the State Department (which surprised me) - and called Blackwater the 'armed wing of the government' - which costs US tax payers $750 million a year.
In terms ideas, he has this to offer: whilst he thinks PMC operations are moving from mere defensive security arrangements (like Blackwater's first contract to protect Paul Bremer in Iraq - which cost a meager $21 million) to more offensive military operations (in which actually battlefield operations are carried out by PMC soldiers) he thinks there's a more subtle public relations sub-text:
"What this really is, is a deep re-branding campaign. [what PMCs are saying is that] 'we're not really mercenaries anymore, we're the peace and stability industry'," he says.
I might pick up his book, but I'm left asking: how hard is it to re-brand an AK-47?
