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A review by redsg
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill
3.0
Blackwater is a book I had been very interested in reading for some time now, due to a couple of reasons: 1) the Nisour Square Massacre was a prominent political event that was as fascinating as it was horrifying and 2) the author, Jeremy Scahill, is someone I consider to be one of the greatest journalists working today.
Alas, I probably should have taken a look at the publication date before I jumped into the text. Blackwater was published in early 2007, in fact, a full 7 months before Nisour Square even happened. What this means is that it's scope wasn't borne out of this tragic massacre but instead was borne out of Scahill's growing concern about the use of mercenaries in the U.S. war machine. It's not that this makes the book bad, it's that it makes it more concerned about the larger picture than the smaller personal events that were the result of this bureaucratic move, which in turn results in a dense work that isn't as engaging as it should be.
Let me put it this way- rather than show the effects of mercenaries and contractors on the ground, Scahill is more interested in talking about how those forces got to the position that they were (are?) in, with civilian casualties and victims treated like pure statistical information. To be fair, I did read the 2008 updated version of the book, which included a new introduction by Scahill that recounted Nisour Square in relative detail, but it feels very tacked on, which in turn makes sense given that the civilian side was never the focus of Scahill.
I know there are plenty of people who will have no problem with this, believing the macro picture to be far more important than the micro affairs that adorn the Middle East post-US invasions. And I agree in principle: we have to work on changing the sociopolitical machinations that lead to the emergence and proliferation of war profiteers and war criminals. However, it wasn't a mutally-exclusive decision: Scahill could have had a healthy balance of general history with anecdotal accounts, and I cite Jim Frederick's Black Hearts as a pristine example of someone pulling this off.
In Black Hearts (you can read my review for it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2468103205?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) Frederick succeeded in incorporating the greater historical changes whilst still keeping the focus on the individuals who were directly involved in the causes/effects of the Iraq War. Now of course, Frederick's topic of choice was much smaller in range than Scahill's, but I strongly believe Scahill could have done more to make things more, for lack of a better term, idiosyncratic to the people of Iraq (to be fair, he does this once when he recounts the USMC's Sieges of Fallujah, but that is a small part in the grand scheme of the novel). Instead what you get is chapter after chapter about profits and contracts reaped by these mercenary groups whilst they continue to operate in these foreign countries unaccountable.
It's not that this information isn't interesting; quite the contrary, Scahill does a remarkable job of breaking down the behind-the-scenes negotiations, corruption, and tactics that resulted in massive political changes for mercs- these are all things that the American (and worldwide) public should be blatantly aware of. However, because it's more about reiterating events of the past, discussing business deals, and pointing out minutiae details about MANY individuals, you do get a text that is more dense than normal and consequently less engaging to non-academic readers. I personally found myself putting down the book for days at a time because I was not able to get caught up in the narrative Scahill was weaving, which is sad given how ridiculous and aggravating the prominence of contractors and private industries in the war effort are.
Not helping Scahill are three unfortunate critiques I have: one, he just isn't as gifted a writer as the aforestated late, great Jim Frederick or fellow journalist Matt Taibbi. Scahill's sentences are more interested in packing some new fact or observation than giving you breathing room, building up the tension, or fleshing out existing ideas...all things that go a long way towards retaining intrigue. He also overuses the word "lucrative" when describing contracts (seriously mate, wasn't there a thesaurus on hand?) and I flat-out hated the way Scahill would incorporate in-text quotes. 9 times out of 10, it wouldn't feel like a continuation of a sentence he started, but instead a haphazard merge between something he was saying and something the other person had said, which irked me since it was an easy fix!
Here's a small example of what I mean from a paragraph in Chapter 3: "Clark says during training sessions he 'gave everybody everything I had when I had them.'" - Scahill starts off in third person, then intermixes a quote from the first person. How do you make such an obvious syntactic mistake? You could've easily fixed it by setting up the quote instead of trying to unnaturally fit itn with your ongoing sentence i.e.. "Clark said of the training sessions 'I gave everybody everything I had....'"
The second critique is that the book not put together well. It's as though Scahill and the editor could not decide how to organize the sheer amount of data present in their research and so made the last-minute choice to flip between three variations: chronological, topical, and historical. Seriously, sometimes you'll be reading about a train of sequential events, only for the next chapter to switch gears and talk about a specific sect of the industry only for the follow-up to then speak about some black ops action years ago only for the next section to RETURN to a single thing that was mentioned in that first part. It's not anthological and it's not divided cogently. Blackwater could have been much better had it been edited in a way that was consistent.
The third is that, too often, Scahill puts his own personal biases against Blackwater (now called Academi) and other security contractors at the expense of more powerful arguments that would have gone a long way towards having universal appeal. Keep one thing in mind- we need bipartisan support if we are to do a massive overhaul of the military-industrial complex, and by bipartisan I don't mean representatives of political parties I mean the political demographics of the American people. Whether you are conservative, liberal, libertarian, moderate, progressive, etc....you will be pissed off at how billions of dollars of your taxpayer money are being funneled into a system of contracts that lack oversight and are consequently exploited by mercenary firms to reap even more coin from Uncle Sam (aka your pocketbook): all this is going on whilst the American people are denied basic services like national healthcare. THAT is the fact that will rile up the masses and get them united against this lobbying group.
And yet, Scahill rarely puts that at the forefront of any of his exposés. It's often a tangential detail that is meant to be implied than directly stated (i.e. "company X won a $15 billion contract...", not "company X stole $15 billion of taxpayer money...."). No, instead what gets the limelight are details meant to alienate/scapegoat particular right-wing groups. Scahill frequently makes the case that it's purely the Republicans who are to blame for the rise of privatization, scantily mentioning that privatization began major initiatives under the Clinton Administration. He conveniently ignores all but one time that, once the Democrats won back Congress in 2006, they didn't do anything to curb the progression of contractors outside of getting more public documentation/disclosures from committees that the GOP had tried to hide- information that they then preceded to do nothing with. It's also beyond amusing to see him prop up then-Senator Obama as this major anti-merc figure at the end given that Obama would go on to not only utilize Blackwater, but further expand the # of contractors in U.S. areas of conflict (though I understand Scahill couldn't have predicted the future).
Look, I'm not trying to act like there isn't a difference between the two parties in terms of how they viewed the rise of private armies- Scahill gives enough evidence and verbatim statements from politicians from both parties that indicate the Democrats at least somewhat care about accountability compared to the insane zealotry of the Republicans. But when the Democratic effort is pathetically weak, you should be providing EVEN HARSHER criticisms given that they're supposed to be the OPPOSITION. “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”- But no, Dems just get a small slap on the wrist and are paraded around by Scahill as civil liberties champions whose voices were stifled by the big bad government (never mind the media power the Dems had at the fingertips courtesy of establishment network giants like CNN and MSNBC). You aren't getting any conservatives on your side this way.
Worse is when Scahill attempts to make the case that there is a Crusader-esque, Racial Holy War being waged by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and co. against the Middle Eastern residents of Iraq. He spends a whole chapter (and makes repeated throwbacks to) Prince's (and other right-wing figures') Christian upbringing, associations with uber-religious figures, and own words regarding the role Christianity plays in these international actions, and I just couldn't help but shake my head regarding this narrative. Is part of it true? Of course, whose education and cultivation DOESN'T influence them? But does anyone for a second think these guys are doing it more for religion than money? You'd be crazy to say no. The Iraq War was just an opportune time for these mercenary scumbags to exploit their way up the food chain. Being a country of Muslims may have been good in terms of generating propaganda, but you could have had any other country and Prince would've garnered the same success. Vietnam, which is frequently compared to Iraq in terms of U.S. military actions, is a country of mostly irreligious folks, the second biggest demographic there being Catholics- does Scahill believe that Prince would've ignored a war profiteering opportunity in Vietnam because Islam wasn't the governing religion? Preposterous to waste space and text on a notion that does not speak to the primary truth and that only alienates potential allies in the anti-mercenary movement. To add salt to the wounds, because he goes down this route, Scahill sometimes can't decide how he wants to paint the actual enlisted "soldiers" of Blackwater- are they stereotypical, gung-ho Americans that want to make money while spreading democracy to the Middle East, or are they working-class individuals who saw an opportunity to provide a greater living for their family than what their current job was giving? There's a jump between these two extremes, and one that Scahill only does when it's convenient to the narrative that he's telling at any given time (i.e. speaking about family reaction of slain members vs. members who are defending a U.S. compound against an Iraqi rebellion- the former is meant to draw sympathy for victims of Blackwater's defensive measures whilst the latter is meant to inspire rage against private forces fighting against the citizenry standing up for their beliefs).
Listen, I know I've been raving nonstop here, but there's a reason I gave Blackwater a solid 3/5 (meaning I recommend you read it)- the sheer amount of facts and knowledge Scahill has compiled into a single piece of literature is an achievement unto itself. No matter the strange way things are arranged, you WILL learn everything there is to know about private militaries and mercenaries: their marketing propaganda, their structure, their history, their lobbying, their actions (public and private), their future plans, etc....Blackwater was an eyeopener, not only of the eponymous company but of the industry at large that it has helped pioneer. When we think of the military-industrial complex, we generally limit ourselves to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, completely ignoring mercenaries or whatever rebranded label they oblige by. They are very prominent, very active, and very dangerous in our current political sphere and the War on Terror, and Scahill deserves a lot of credit for creating a digestible, encyclopedic text on this matter.
There's no denying that it could've been a lot better in terms of scope, but as it stands, Blackwater is recommended reading to anyone even a little bit interested in where their taxpayer dollars are REALLY going. This is one of those titles, though, wherein I feel the follow-up would be more interesting a read, especially given the rebranding of Blackwater to Xe Services and Academi and Trump's pardon of the Nisour Square murderers.
Alas, I probably should have taken a look at the publication date before I jumped into the text. Blackwater was published in early 2007, in fact, a full 7 months before Nisour Square even happened. What this means is that it's scope wasn't borne out of this tragic massacre but instead was borne out of Scahill's growing concern about the use of mercenaries in the U.S. war machine. It's not that this makes the book bad, it's that it makes it more concerned about the larger picture than the smaller personal events that were the result of this bureaucratic move, which in turn results in a dense work that isn't as engaging as it should be.
Let me put it this way- rather than show the effects of mercenaries and contractors on the ground, Scahill is more interested in talking about how those forces got to the position that they were (are?) in, with civilian casualties and victims treated like pure statistical information. To be fair, I did read the 2008 updated version of the book, which included a new introduction by Scahill that recounted Nisour Square in relative detail, but it feels very tacked on, which in turn makes sense given that the civilian side was never the focus of Scahill.
I know there are plenty of people who will have no problem with this, believing the macro picture to be far more important than the micro affairs that adorn the Middle East post-US invasions. And I agree in principle: we have to work on changing the sociopolitical machinations that lead to the emergence and proliferation of war profiteers and war criminals. However, it wasn't a mutally-exclusive decision: Scahill could have had a healthy balance of general history with anecdotal accounts, and I cite Jim Frederick's Black Hearts as a pristine example of someone pulling this off.
In Black Hearts (you can read my review for it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2468103205?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) Frederick succeeded in incorporating the greater historical changes whilst still keeping the focus on the individuals who were directly involved in the causes/effects of the Iraq War. Now of course, Frederick's topic of choice was much smaller in range than Scahill's, but I strongly believe Scahill could have done more to make things more, for lack of a better term, idiosyncratic to the people of Iraq (to be fair, he does this once when he recounts the USMC's Sieges of Fallujah, but that is a small part in the grand scheme of the novel). Instead what you get is chapter after chapter about profits and contracts reaped by these mercenary groups whilst they continue to operate in these foreign countries unaccountable.
It's not that this information isn't interesting; quite the contrary, Scahill does a remarkable job of breaking down the behind-the-scenes negotiations, corruption, and tactics that resulted in massive political changes for mercs- these are all things that the American (and worldwide) public should be blatantly aware of. However, because it's more about reiterating events of the past, discussing business deals, and pointing out minutiae details about MANY individuals, you do get a text that is more dense than normal and consequently less engaging to non-academic readers. I personally found myself putting down the book for days at a time because I was not able to get caught up in the narrative Scahill was weaving, which is sad given how ridiculous and aggravating the prominence of contractors and private industries in the war effort are.
Not helping Scahill are three unfortunate critiques I have: one, he just isn't as gifted a writer as the aforestated late, great Jim Frederick or fellow journalist Matt Taibbi. Scahill's sentences are more interested in packing some new fact or observation than giving you breathing room, building up the tension, or fleshing out existing ideas...all things that go a long way towards retaining intrigue. He also overuses the word "lucrative" when describing contracts (seriously mate, wasn't there a thesaurus on hand?) and I flat-out hated the way Scahill would incorporate in-text quotes. 9 times out of 10, it wouldn't feel like a continuation of a sentence he started, but instead a haphazard merge between something he was saying and something the other person had said, which irked me since it was an easy fix!
Here's a small example of what I mean from a paragraph in Chapter 3: "Clark says during training sessions he 'gave everybody everything I had when I had them.'" - Scahill starts off in third person, then intermixes a quote from the first person. How do you make such an obvious syntactic mistake? You could've easily fixed it by setting up the quote instead of trying to unnaturally fit itn with your ongoing sentence i.e.. "Clark said of the training sessions 'I gave everybody everything I had....'"
The second critique is that the book not put together well. It's as though Scahill and the editor could not decide how to organize the sheer amount of data present in their research and so made the last-minute choice to flip between three variations: chronological, topical, and historical. Seriously, sometimes you'll be reading about a train of sequential events, only for the next chapter to switch gears and talk about a specific sect of the industry only for the follow-up to then speak about some black ops action years ago only for the next section to RETURN to a single thing that was mentioned in that first part. It's not anthological and it's not divided cogently. Blackwater could have been much better had it been edited in a way that was consistent.
The third is that, too often, Scahill puts his own personal biases against Blackwater (now called Academi) and other security contractors at the expense of more powerful arguments that would have gone a long way towards having universal appeal. Keep one thing in mind- we need bipartisan support if we are to do a massive overhaul of the military-industrial complex, and by bipartisan I don't mean representatives of political parties I mean the political demographics of the American people. Whether you are conservative, liberal, libertarian, moderate, progressive, etc....you will be pissed off at how billions of dollars of your taxpayer money are being funneled into a system of contracts that lack oversight and are consequently exploited by mercenary firms to reap even more coin from Uncle Sam (aka your pocketbook): all this is going on whilst the American people are denied basic services like national healthcare. THAT is the fact that will rile up the masses and get them united against this lobbying group.
And yet, Scahill rarely puts that at the forefront of any of his exposés. It's often a tangential detail that is meant to be implied than directly stated (i.e. "company X won a $15 billion contract...", not "company X stole $15 billion of taxpayer money...."). No, instead what gets the limelight are details meant to alienate/scapegoat particular right-wing groups. Scahill frequently makes the case that it's purely the Republicans who are to blame for the rise of privatization, scantily mentioning that privatization began major initiatives under the Clinton Administration. He conveniently ignores all but one time that, once the Democrats won back Congress in 2006, they didn't do anything to curb the progression of contractors outside of getting more public documentation/disclosures from committees that the GOP had tried to hide- information that they then preceded to do nothing with. It's also beyond amusing to see him prop up then-Senator Obama as this major anti-merc figure at the end given that Obama would go on to not only utilize Blackwater, but further expand the # of contractors in U.S. areas of conflict (though I understand Scahill couldn't have predicted the future).
Look, I'm not trying to act like there isn't a difference between the two parties in terms of how they viewed the rise of private armies- Scahill gives enough evidence and verbatim statements from politicians from both parties that indicate the Democrats at least somewhat care about accountability compared to the insane zealotry of the Republicans. But when the Democratic effort is pathetically weak, you should be providing EVEN HARSHER criticisms given that they're supposed to be the OPPOSITION. “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”- But no, Dems just get a small slap on the wrist and are paraded around by Scahill as civil liberties champions whose voices were stifled by the big bad government (never mind the media power the Dems had at the fingertips courtesy of establishment network giants like CNN and MSNBC). You aren't getting any conservatives on your side this way.
Worse is when Scahill attempts to make the case that there is a Crusader-esque, Racial Holy War being waged by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and co. against the Middle Eastern residents of Iraq. He spends a whole chapter (and makes repeated throwbacks to) Prince's (and other right-wing figures') Christian upbringing, associations with uber-religious figures, and own words regarding the role Christianity plays in these international actions, and I just couldn't help but shake my head regarding this narrative. Is part of it true? Of course, whose education and cultivation DOESN'T influence them? But does anyone for a second think these guys are doing it more for religion than money? You'd be crazy to say no. The Iraq War was just an opportune time for these mercenary scumbags to exploit their way up the food chain. Being a country of Muslims may have been good in terms of generating propaganda, but you could have had any other country and Prince would've garnered the same success. Vietnam, which is frequently compared to Iraq in terms of U.S. military actions, is a country of mostly irreligious folks, the second biggest demographic there being Catholics- does Scahill believe that Prince would've ignored a war profiteering opportunity in Vietnam because Islam wasn't the governing religion? Preposterous to waste space and text on a notion that does not speak to the primary truth and that only alienates potential allies in the anti-mercenary movement. To add salt to the wounds, because he goes down this route, Scahill sometimes can't decide how he wants to paint the actual enlisted "soldiers" of Blackwater- are they stereotypical, gung-ho Americans that want to make money while spreading democracy to the Middle East, or are they working-class individuals who saw an opportunity to provide a greater living for their family than what their current job was giving? There's a jump between these two extremes, and one that Scahill only does when it's convenient to the narrative that he's telling at any given time (i.e. speaking about family reaction of slain members vs. members who are defending a U.S. compound against an Iraqi rebellion- the former is meant to draw sympathy for victims of Blackwater's defensive measures whilst the latter is meant to inspire rage against private forces fighting against the citizenry standing up for their beliefs).
Listen, I know I've been raving nonstop here, but there's a reason I gave Blackwater a solid 3/5 (meaning I recommend you read it)- the sheer amount of facts and knowledge Scahill has compiled into a single piece of literature is an achievement unto itself. No matter the strange way things are arranged, you WILL learn everything there is to know about private militaries and mercenaries: their marketing propaganda, their structure, their history, their lobbying, their actions (public and private), their future plans, etc....Blackwater was an eyeopener, not only of the eponymous company but of the industry at large that it has helped pioneer. When we think of the military-industrial complex, we generally limit ourselves to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, completely ignoring mercenaries or whatever rebranded label they oblige by. They are very prominent, very active, and very dangerous in our current political sphere and the War on Terror, and Scahill deserves a lot of credit for creating a digestible, encyclopedic text on this matter.
There's no denying that it could've been a lot better in terms of scope, but as it stands, Blackwater is recommended reading to anyone even a little bit interested in where their taxpayer dollars are REALLY going. This is one of those titles, though, wherein I feel the follow-up would be more interesting a read, especially given the rebranding of Blackwater to Xe Services and Academi and Trump's pardon of the Nisour Square murderers.