Draft Dodgers

What with Blackwater killing innocent Iraqis regularly and at random, quite a few people have been questioning the wisdom of hiring mercenaries, but none have got at what this phenomenon means as well as Brendan O'Neill (a past EP guest). He argues, essentially, that far from representing Washington's authority, the mercenaries represent Washington's loss of authority, and legitimacy. Now, in the first place I think Brendan tends to conflate the idea of power generally with a particular kind of authority, which may be seriously inaccurate. Secondly, he cites an extremely high estimate for mercenaries — 200,000 — higher than I've seen almost anywhere else, and furthermore wrongly leaves the impression that they're all armed. They're not. Most are mess boys, truck drivers, and whatnot. About 15,000 are trigger-pullers, tops. Although that sounds like a lot less, and perhaps starts to appear unimportant compared to regular forces, consider that of the 160,000 troops in Iraq probably no more than 45,000 are combat arms. So it is, indeed, a relatively very large number. Otherwise, Brendan's very much on point. Instead of state authority used to wage war we've fallen back to the times when rich people in their gated and guarded estates (castles) hire thugs like Blackwater to carry out various vendettas.