OT: Hired Guns


MUNICH - Private armies have a very sinister reputation in
Europe.

Memories still linger of Germany's post First World War army
veterans, the Stahlhelm, and Nazi Brownshirts, who battled
Communist street toughs in Munich and Berlin.

Europeans remember Italy's fascist Blackshirts and, most
recently, Serb neo-fascist gangs like Arkan's Tigers and the
White Eagles who committed some of the worst atrocities in
Bosnia and Kosovo.

Germany also remains haunted by folk memory of the hordes of
blood-crazed mercenaries who turned much of this nation into a
wasteland during the savage 30 Years War. The name of the great
mercenary captain, Wallenstein, still resounds, and of those
most feared mercenaries of all, the ferocious Swiss, who once
terrorized Europe.

Wrote Machiavelli: "where there is gold and blood, there are the
Swiss." The Vatican's Swiss Guard is a faint reminder of the
"furia Helvetica."

Small numbers of mercenaries have been used in many modern wars,
from Vietnam to Central America. The most famed modern mercenary
force is France's tough Foreign Legion.

The rise of powerful mercenary armies within the United States,
and their use in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an entirely new,
deeply disturbing development.

Last weekend, mercenaries from the U.S. firm Blackwater gunned
down 11 Iraqi civilians during an attack on a convoy they were
guarding. Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, ordered
Blackwater's thousands of swaggering mercenaries expelled from
Iraq. But his order was quickly countermanded by U.S. occupation
authorities.

There are 180,000 to 200,000 U.S.-paid mercenaries in Iraq -- or
"private contractors" as Washington and the U.S. media
delicately call them. They actually outnumber the 169,000 U.S.
troops there. Britain pays for another 20,000. At least half are
armed fighters, the rest support personnel and technicians.
Without them, the U.S. and Britain could not maintain their
occupation of Iraq.

These private enterprise fighters, like the Renaissance's
Italian condotierri, German landsknecht, and Swiss pikemen, are
lawless, answering to no authority but their employers.
Democrats in the U.S. Congress are rightly demanding these
trigger-happy Rambos to be at least brought under American
military law.

Blackwater

The U.S. State Department now has its own little army in Iraq
and Afghanistan of about 3,000 Blackwater gunmen who protect
American officials and their local collaborators. Some reports
say the State Department has spent $678 million alone with
Blackwater since 2003.

Afghanistan's U.S.-installed leader, Hamid Karzai, is surrounded
at all times by 200 American bodyguards, his own people not
being trusted to protect their president. Iraq's U.S.-installed
leaders are similarly guarded by U.S. mercenaries.

Nearly all Washington's contracts for mercenaries are awarded
without competitive bidding to firms close to the Republican
Party. Blackwater's owners are major contributors. Their 7,000-
acre base in the southern U. S. is likely the world's largest
non-government military operation and a menacing creation
straight out of the famous film, Seven Days in May.

This unprecedented use of mercenaries has masked the depths of
U.S. involvement in Iraq and clearly shows how little the
occupying forces can rely on the locals, whom they supposedly
"liberated." It has also allowed the U.S. to sustain an imperial
war that could never have been waged with conscripted American
soldiers, as Vietnam showed.

Unleashed

Vice-President *** Cheney took Vietnam's lesson to heart by
championing use of mercenaries for nasty foreign wars. But
democracies should have no business unleashing armies of hired
gunmen on the world.

Worse, these private armies hardwired to the Republican Party's
far right are a grave and intolerable danger to the American
republic. Congress should outlaw them absolutely. The great
Roman Republic held that mandatory military service by all
citizens was the basis of democracy, while professional armies
were a grave menace.

How ironic that colonial America, which rose up in arms in
response to the British crown's use of brutal German
mercenaries, is resorting to the same tactics in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Europe wants no more of private armies. Americans
have yet to learn this painful lesson

Hired guns, loose cannons
By ERIC MARGOLIS

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