Blackwater

File this under “law of unintended consequences”. Or perhaps they were intended.

A relatively secretive group called Blackwater came to public attention last spring after the publication of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill. The book highlights the ins and outs of this organization (including the former Navy Seal/Born-Again Evangelical billionaire founder) and discusses the implications of the group.

I couldn’t do the story justice by trying to tell you who this group really is, but I will give you this:

• They have been granted over $800 billion in no-bid contracts from the U.S. government for work in Iraq.
• They are not operatives of the U.S. military and have no relationship with them.
• Nor do they fall under a provision that allows them to represent the U.S. in a foreign nation and therefore fall under the jurisdiction of international military law.
• They are universally better paid than U.S. soldiers and have more access to body armor and armored equipment.
• If you are following along at home—since we are paying them to be there, then that means that our tax dollars are paying for mercenaries to be better equipped than our military.
• They were brought into Iraq to protect convoys of contractors (Halliburton, perhaps?) but since 2004 have increasingly been used as a military presence, with over 1,000 armed civilian operatives in Iraq.
• They are universally despised by Iraqis for their rude behavior, carelessness, and disregard for civilian life.

And the kicker: “The question of whether they could face prosecution is legally murky. Unlike soldiers, the contractors are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under a special provision secured by American-occupying forces, they are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there.” (emphasis mine)

So here it is. Our fragile international community is governed by a few principles: sovereignty, peace, human rights, and fair trade. We ask our neighbors to behave themselves and we promise, in turn, to behave ourselves. Since the writing of the Magna Carta through the Geneva Convention, humanity has sought ways to work together and developed broad and decent international codes; codes by which we could all agree to live. For the brief 231 years since we declared our independence, the U.S. has stood by these codes, helped write these codes, and develop the relationships that would become the organizations of NATO and the United Nations. We have served as a (relatively) honorable member of the international community.

Then we broke the first one: we declared Iraq’s sovereignty benign. We invaded militarily, breaking the second one. We reconstituted prisons off our soil (Cuba and Iraq) where we would systematically commit acts of torture or else ship them off to other countries under the cover of darkness and let those countries commit torture (destroying that third provision). And not to leave them all untouched, we felt compelled to destroy the cradle of civilization, devastating the thousands of archaeological digs in southern Iraq and manipulating the markets in the Middle East (that fourth provision).

So, we don’t seem to care about international law, and we disregard our own laws. So what happens when we constitute this mercenary group in Iraq? We allow them to exist as a unique entity without any means of holding them accountable. The U.S. military and the Iraqi government have no jurisdiction to hold Blackwater accountable for their actions, even after the public killing of four civilians and reports of indiscriminate shootings at civilian and soldier alike. Where does this put us? And because we’ve done it, what grounds can we stop other countries from selling off their warmaking to civilians, abdicating their own responsibility and culpability? What is there left of both democracy and diplomacy? And what of human decency?

Then again, we can all pretend it never happened and save our moral outrage for ‘foreigners’. Americans have always done a great job of that.