Decline and Fall

One feature that I neglected to address in my recent posts on Blackwater was brought up by some of the commenters to those posts, for instance this one:

The scariest thing about some entity like Blackwater turning America into a police state is the fact that they hire foriegn soldiers of fortune. These Hessians could one day be marching down our streets and commanding American citizens at the point of a gun barrel. Just like they are doing in Iraq. And you see the results there. A lot of dead people.

Although I am hesitant to declare the police state nearly here, I am mindful of the dangers of allowing the seeds for it to be planted while we all assure ourselves that it could never come to that.

As for those foreign soldiers of fortune, I see them all the time. The most visible to me are the guys guarding our mess halls. All of the ones at my local facility seem to be from Uganda, as far as I can tell (I've had brief conversations with some of them). To a man, they seem like nice people, but then again so did Eichmann. The fact of the matter, however, is that they are standing outside (and sometimes inside) our dining facilities with loaded weapons. I've never asked if they have rounds chambered, but the magazines are in their M-16s, which means they could be firing three-round bursts withing seconds if the situation called for it.

While I don't live in fear of them staging an armed takeover of the salad bar, I do wonder what kind of status they might be afforded if their employer, EOD Technology, were called upon to provide homeland security. Doubtless there would be cries of protestation from all corners of the political spectrum shoudl they ever arrive stateside (the Dems would cry "civil liberties" while the GOP would play the xenophobia card, I suspect) but I'm not at all convinced that our Unitary Executive would pay them any heed. The legal aspect of this is something I am utterly unqualified to expound upon, so I won't.

We need to understand this very clearly: the United States is arming private armies of foreign nationals to provide security for its own military on installations in Iraq. This isn't a "coalition of the willing" here, because they aren't operating under their nation's flag. They are employees of American companies, beholden primarily to those companies, and they're paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. And it's not like they're only guarding the mess halls. Foreign security contractors go outside the wire just like Americans.

This would be distressing even if the ones I referred to weren't from a country that is one of the biggest offenders in the horrific production of child soldiers in the world. Were some of the guys guarding me while I eat abducted at a tender age by the Lord's Resistance Army? Somehow, I doubt their employer keeps statistics on these things.

But the point is not that they are foreign, but that they are there at all, and largely unaccountable for their actions.

Labels: Iraq, liberty, mercenaries, military