Private Security Contractors
There are 32 security
companies still operating in Iraq, ten of which are British and eleven from the
US. These companies had a good war. They have made billions of dollars
annually since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“The sector is one of the UK’s most
successful service providers, bringing in billions of dollars of revenue and
earning widespread recognition for its professionalism and competence”,
according to an executive of Aegis, one of the big British private security
contractors (quoted in ‘Soldiers of fortune cannot remain outside the law’ by
Max Hastings, Financial Times, 14 August 2009, from which most of the
information in this section is drawn).
It is a measure of the sick society under
the conditions of imperialism that the business of hired guns for mass
slaughter is euphemistically characterised as service provision and the ability
to kill or maim without flinching or any moral compunction as “professionalism
and competence”.
While the occupation generated a turnover
of $900 million for private contractors in 2003, it rose to $2.4 billion in
2005.
These companies are notoriously trigger
happy and, since their employees are immune from prosecution, they literally
get away with murder. Most of the time their murderous activity is hidden from
the public eye and simply disappears into the grim litany of everyday violence
characteristic of Iraq since the beginning of Anglo-American imperialism’s predatory
war against the Iraqi people. Every now and then, however, some truly shocking
event forces the truth about their activities to ooze out, as it were, as, for
instance, when on 16 September 2007, private military contractors working for
Blackwater (since renamed Xe), the US security company, shot and killed 17
innocent Iraqis in a Baghdad square. According to a report by the US Congress,
Blackwater, which by the end of 2007 had received nearly $1 billion from the US
State Department for protecting its functionaries, had opened fire first
in 163 out of 195 shooting incidents between 2005 and the autumn of 2007.
Never has any of its employees ever been charged, as under a 2004 US decree signed by Paul Bremner, the US viceroy, who brought in Blackwater, the actions of private
contractors are immune from prosecution.
Mercenary companies – guns for hire – is a
very big business. Britain is home to some of the largest of these companies,
including Aegis, Control Risks, Erinys and Armour Group, a subsidiary of G4S,
Britain’s largest security company. They have posh offices in London and annual
turnovers that in some cases are in excess of £100million ($166m, €116m). As
lucrative rewards overcome all scruples, several of these companies boast
retired generals as their chairmen or directors, while recruiting a steady flow
of former members of the SAS and Parachute Regiment. In some cases, they have
thousands of employees on their pay rolls. Aegis, run by Tim Spicer, a former
British army lieutenant colonel, has a workforce the size of a military
division and ranks as one of the largest corporate military groups ever put
together. It received upwards of £246 million from a three-year contract with
the Pentagon to co-ordinate military and security companies in Iraq. Erinys secured more than £86 million, a substantial portion for the protection of
oilfields. All in all, British private security contractors have more than
30,000 security personnel working in Iraq.
With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
continuing for several years into the future, and many more imperialist
predatory wars being planned, combined with the inability of the imperialist
governments to substantially increase the size of their non-conscript army,
private security contractors have become an essential and integral part of the
imperialist war machine, important in every theatre of war but operating
outside the law, which is saying something since the depredations of the
invading imperialist soldiery can hardly be described as within the law.
As long as imperialism,
and with it the wars produced by this system, last, the commercial future of
these vultures is bright.