Ten years ago, when my son was three years old, Jeremy Scahill was the only one who could get him into the bathtub without a fight, a feat for which I am eternally grateful. “Don’t you get in that tub,� he’d say, and off my boy would go, determined to defy the enemy, even if it meant getting clean.
Jeremy’s innate understanding of the mindset of a young boy has surely held him in good stead as he’s probed the depth’s of our government’s latest deadly scheme: soldiers-for-hire. In his comprehensive new book Blackwater, The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Army, Jeremy exposes not only our government’s reliance on privately contracted soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also the religious, economic and political development of the US government’s mercenary mindset.
After reading hundreds of pages of well-documented accounts of back-room deals, bloody battles, civilian casualties, corner-cutting administrators, and arrogant machismo, I’m left with the feeling that these rich, conservative Christian, well-connected, heavily-armed men believe it is their right and duty to make lots of money from war, even if it means killing civilians, violating the Constitution, destroying sovereignty and getting yourself killed.
Jeremy has done an incredible job researching the paths of many individuals—-from the soldiers-for-hire to the men who employ them to the political big-wigs who support the trend toward a mercenary army. Their paths pass through so many parts of today’s Empire that by the end of the book, one is not only intimately familiar with the people of Blackwater, but also with anyone connected to thise huge enterprise: the Ambassadors, the School of Americas graduates, the conservative politicians and the soldiers’ families.
It’s hard to say what’s most troubling about Jeremy’s book; the exorbitant amount of taxpayer’s money being spent to pay mercenaries, the lack of accountability of privately hired soldiers, the religious zeal behind the politicians who champion Blackwater in the halls of Congress, or the frightening extent to which mercenaries have already become the world’s most powerful army.
Yesterday, my 14-year-old son told me he’d seen a cool video game in which “you can command Blackwater troops�. I’m banking on Jeremy’s expose to help our sons see the mercenary army for the ugly, deadly, thieving horror it is. Thanks again, Jeremy