Abstract
One aspect of the Iraq war that the general public is largely unaware of is the extent to which it was a great experiment in the privatisation of war. The process of military privatisation had begun during the Reagan/Thatcher period but it was given a gigantic boost during the Iraq war and occupation; so much so that, by 2010, the world market for private security was estimated to be worth $200 billion. Of course, this process of privatisation was focused principally on logistics, training and maintenance, but there was also the emergence of new corporate mercenary companies that put large numbers of heavily armed men on the ground, providing protection and security whether for private contractors and their installations, for military bases, for supply convoys, or for officials, administrators and politicians. Whereas the most notorious of these mercenary companies, Blackwater, had security contracts worth a mere $736,000 in 2001, by 2006 its contracts were worth $593 million. Clearly this is a phenomenon of tremendous significance and there is already a quite extensive literature examining it. This literature is, however, overwhelmingly academic and highly specialised, not accessible to the lay man and woman who urgently need to know about these developments. Unfortunately Scott Fitzsimmons’ Private Security Companies during the Iraq War is very much in this mould, a specialised academic study with a very narrow focus. Nevertheless, the book makes for fascinating reading and the huge amount of empirical material Fitzsimmons has assembled is extremely useful. This is almost despite his stated intentions, however.
Fitzsimmons’ concern is to apply ‘the ideational theory of tactical violence’ to the practice of two particular military companies, Blackwater and DynCorp. Blackwater was, of course, a company specialising in providing armed mercenaries for both state, principally the US, and private clients. On at least one occasion it provided protection for Tony Blair when he visited Iraq. By way of a contrast, for DynCorp the provision of armed mercenaries was something of a sideline that generated only around 2 per cent of its total income. In 2007, the US State Department contracted for 1,395 mercenaries in Iraq, of whom 987 were provided by Blackwater, 151 by DynCorp and another 257 by Triple Canopy, a company not examined here. These men were not conventional bodyguards, but were, rather, private military escorts who came heavily armed and equipped with armoured vehicles and armed helicopters.
What Fitzsimmons sets out to demonstrate is that the level of violence deployed by these mercenaries in protecting their clients was a function of their professional culture. Put somewhat crudely, but nevertheless accurately, he seeks to show that mercenaries with a gung ho trigger-happy culture were more likely to dish out lethal violence than those with a more restrained culture. This is, of course, more of a truism than a theory. Nevertheless, the material assembled to demonstrate the point is extremely interesting, although there are some problems. Fitzsimmons’ painstaking chronicling of ammunition expended does not take into account the well-known phenomenon of soldiers having quantities of off-the-books ammunition available so as to avoid accusations of being trigger happy. And there are more general questions as to whose testimony to believe in accounts of particular episodes. Fitzsimmons discusses the Blackwater defence of a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) compound in Najaf in April 2004. The mercenaries were battling against overwhelming odds, running out of ammunition, but nevertheless held on, killing hundreds of their attackers. Without their bravery the compound would have been overrun and the CPA personnel massacred. That, at least, is the Blackwater version. Or do we believe General Ricardo Sanchez, the US military commander in Iraq at the time, who, in his memoirs, Wiser in Battle, bluntly and categorically denies that there ever was a ‘battle of Najaf’. He helicoptered into the supposed battle zone only to find the CPA personnel panicking and, as he puts it with a certain studied contempt, the ‘Blackwater civilians’ relaying ‘bogus information’.
Nevertheless, as Fitzsimmons fairly conclusively shows, ‘Blackwater’s military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater range and with a greater number of bullets and to abandon people they shot at more readily when compared to DynCorp’s personnel’. Indeed, not only did Blackwater gunmen ‘inflict a great deal of harm during the Iraq War’, they also ‘inflicted much of this upon non-insurgents who posed little or no threat to the firm or its clients’. Indeed, ‘Blackwater’s personnel chose to inflict a great deal of unnecessary harm during their security operations in Iraq’. They fired on Iraqi vehicles that came too close to their own, rammed suspect vehicles and forced them off the road, set up roadblocks and accorded themselves the right of way without any regard whatsoever for the Iraqi population and their safety. Indeed, one British mercenary has actually argued that many of the attacks on the likes of Blackwater were not the work of insurgents at all, but rather of ‘locals fired up by road rage’ at the behaviour of the mercenary convoys.
One question that Fitzsimmons does not adequately explore is the commercial rationale for Blackwater’s shoot first and drive off culture. He makes the point that none of their clients were ever killed or seriously injured, which was obviously a big factor in the firm’s commercial success. Indeed, a case can be made that its readiness to shoot at Iraqis on suspicion was in fact a commercial decision that was put into effect by means of an aggressive military culture. Clients were reassured by the knowledge that they would be protected whatever the collateral damage inflicted on the Iraqi people. Similarly, he does not adequately explore the argument that the working out of these commercial imperatives damaged the US military effort by contributing to the alienation of the Iraqi people, actually worsening the overall security situation. This was certainly a concern of at least some in the US military. There is, it has to be said, something particularly unsavoury about the likes of Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA and one of the men primarily responsible for the whole Iraq debacle, compounding the offence by ensuring his own personal safety courtesy of Blackwater regardless of the way that firm’s conduct increased the overall danger to Coalition forces.
The routine excesses of Blackwater were effectively condoned by the US State Department and Department of Defence up until the Nisour Square massacre of 16 September 2007. On this occasion a convoy of four Blackwater armoured vehicles, having delivered their clients safely, got trapped in traffic, panicked, and opened fire on civilian vehicles and passers-by. Their helicopter escort joined in the carnage. By the time they made their escape, they had killed seventeen men, women and children and wounded more than twenty. This was too dramatic an episode for the usual blind eye response. Indeed, at least in Iraq (but not in Afghanistan), from this point on, Blackwater became a liability. Iraqi demands that the firm be expelled from the country were vetoed by the Americans, not least because its personnel were regarded as playing an essential security role and could not be replaced at short notice. Nevertheless, Blackwater’s brand had been seriously damaged. The bad publicity occasioned by the massacre was compounded by the civil case brought against the firm in the US in October. Here Blackwater was accused of having ‘created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company’s financial interests at the expense of innocent human life’. (Blackwater did not defend the civil suit, but settled it out of court for an undisclosed sum.) Blackwater’s involvement in Iraq finally ended in December 2009. Eventually, four Blackwater employees were tried and sentenced for the Nisour Square massacre back in the US, one receiving a life sentence and the other three thirty years in prison in April 2015.
In the aftermath of the massacre, Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services, and then morphed into Academi and finally, in June 2014, to Constellis Holdings. It is still the recipient of lucrative contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from US government agencies, particularly from the CIA. Quite incredibly, today Constellis has the contract for the protection of the US embassy in Baghdad, a contract awarded by the Obama administration no less.