What Blackwater Tells Us About Government

What Blackwater Tells Us About Government

by Mark Luedtke

If you read the news reports or watched the Congressional show hearings about the private security firm Blackwater USA, you probably think its owner, Erik Prince, is either a demon or a saint, and Blackwater's employees are either courageous heroes or murdering thugs. The truth is complicated, and this polarization tells us more about US government than it does about Blackwater.

Blackwater USA is the major private security firm employed by the US State Department to provide security for diplomats, congressmen and VIPs that visit Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. Nobody under Blackwater's protection has ever been killed or captured. 27 Blackwater employees have lost their lives in Iraq since the start of the war, including the 4 contractors who were killed and their bodies desecrated in 2004, prompting the Fallujah assault.

But in carrying out these missions, Blackwater sometimes, very rarely, kills civilians, and they've been criticized for firing indiscriminately when under attack. In the most recent incident, after a bomb exploded in Nisour Square in Baghdad, Blackwater responded, killing 17 Iranian civilians.

But first, the far bigger story than Blackwater is the story Blackwater replaced in the news: al Qaeda attacks in Iraq. In the absence of any spectacular attacks, the worst story about Iraq the media can push is Blackwater. This is a testament to Gen. Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy and to our troops implementing it. They have been so successful pacifying Iraq since President Bush changed course that the media has to search for bad news to report. Democrats have abandoned the Iraq war as an issue because every time they bring it up, they are exposed as the party that once again tried to defeat their own nation in a war when they should have been working for victory.

But investigating Blackwater informs us about our dysfunctional government. The hearings should have publicized these issues, but did not.

Protecting American officials is one of few legitimate functions of government, so why did the State Dept. hire Blackwater for security instead of using our own experts? We have military personnel and secret servicemen who are trained for this job at taxpayer expense, but the job of protecting the officials visiting Iraq fell to the State Dept., not the Defense Dept. or the Treasury Dept. Because our government is dominated by unaccountable bureaucracies, more like feuding medieval fiefdoms than government agencies, these organizations refuse to work together. Titanic federal bureaucracies undermine every facet of American life, not just Blackwater.

Eisenhower warned us about the failures of federal bureaucracies during the implementation of the Marshall Plan, but Americans still haven't learned. Even after WWII our bureaucracies were incapable of working together. Bureaucracies have a life of their own and care only about their own survival, territory and growth. And fed by both parties, our bureaucracies exploded in size. Millions of entrenched bureaucrats are unaccountable to anybody. They're changing our culture instead of us changing theirs. To regain control of them, we have to abolish many and gut and rebuild the rest into small, accountable organizations with only the severely limited powers enumerated in the Constitution.

Congress continues to look the other way while Blackwater raids our most highly trained and elite troops in the war on terror: the special forces. Taxpayers pay to train those units then Blackwater offers exorbitant salaries to hire them away. Congress allows Blackwater to rob taxpayers of our investment, rob the military of its most critical troops, then charge taxpayers nearly $500,000 per contractor for private security. We pay Blackwater nearly $350 million for 2007. Our taxes made Prince a billionaire for raiding our special forces and weakening our military during war. Congress does not look out for the interests of the people on any issue, not just Blackwater.

Conservative leaders tell us this is the new security apparatus in war, but it doesn't have to be that way. In 2006 the American people rejected President Bush's failed Iraq strategy and demanded he change course to win the war. Bush did exactly that. The American people rejected the Bush/Senate amnesty bill and demanded Bush enforce our borders and hold employers of illegal aliens accountable. Bush did exactly that.

We could reform government and provide security for our officials, but conservative leaders don't want us to think about that because Prince and Blackwater are major campaign contributors to Republicans. In return for their contributions, nearly 90% of Blackwater's contracts are no-bid contracts, providing Blackwater a government protected monopoly. This shows us that Republicans are more interested in political favors than what's good for Americans.

Democrats are no different. A large Democratic campaign contributor, the trial lawyer who is suing Blackwater on behalf of the families of the 4 contractors killed in Fallujah, provoked Democrats to hold the Blackwater show hearings. The donor offered to stop the hearing if Blackwater settled the lawsuit for $20 million. Prince refused, so the hearing proceeded. At the hearing, both parties pandered to their contributors instead of asking hard questions about what is best for the country. Pandering and vying for power, as we see every day, is the primary function of the 2 parties.

Investigating Blackwater shows that our government is broken. The 2 parties care only about pandering and vote buying, not good government. This will remain true until we the people reject these 2 parties and demand Constitutional government.