Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Outsourcing the Military: Blackwater and Bush

The second-largest army in Iraq does not belong to a country, it belongs to a corporation. They are the tens of thousands of private security contractors in which Blackwater dominates.

While these private contractors are mercenaries, they are there at the behest and policy direction of the Bush administration but are not accounted for in Bush’s surge numbers. This contractor-army constitutes an undeclared expansion of the US presence and a privatisation of the war in Iraq.

blackwater-cover.jpgJeremy Scahill of The Nation and author of Blackwater provides an authoritative look at Blackwater and the Bush administration (RT 4:25).

See also:

* Robert Baer, Iraq’s Mercenary King, 15 March Vanity Fair (April 2007 print ed.)

* Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater, Inc. and the Privatization of the Bush War Machine, Counterpunch (25 Jan 2007)

* M. Idrees Ahmad, The Dogs of War, The Fanonite, 21 March 2007

On Democracy Now! (7:07 and 7:14)

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Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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