02/09/15 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line I've got Kelly B. Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine.
Got one hell of a great archive at antiwar.com, too.
Hi, Kelly, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott, thanks.
I'm doing pretty good.
Good, good.
Happy to talk to you again, and always happy to read you.
This one is called A Blackwater World Order.
Oh, what fun.
So let's talk about fascism.
I mean, public-private partnerships in war.
Yeah.
That is the same thing.
This really all started with, I think, as you put it here, not even the invasion of Afghanistan.
It was the invasion of Iraq that necessitated, in quotes, the rise of this new mercenary state that kind of exists fluidly throughout the world now.
Yeah.
Well, I basically interviewed a gentleman by the name of Sean McFate, who's done some work as a military contractor and in the military.
So he felt like he wanted to sort of get his perspective out on when he was hired as a DynCorp soldier to stop a genocide in Burundi back in 2011.
But we'll put that aside for a second.
So I based my story on some of the research that Sean had done on military contracting.
What he found is, and what his thesis is, is that the outsourcing of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were historical and that even at one point in these wars there were more military contractors than soldiers.
It was the largest outsourcing in American history of any war that we fought.
And what he has done has unleashed a model and a world order of magnitude across the conflict areas of the world.
Basically, everybody is hiring mercenaries to fight their wars, to protect their embassies, to protect their palaces, to suppress revolts, insurgencies, protect their shipping.
For humanitarian reasons, NGOs are hiring mercenaries to help them to protect their missions and conflict zones.
So what his thesis is, what he contends, is that we are going back to a world order that looks more like the Middle Ages than it does in the post-Westphalian order, what he describes as the rise of sovereign states in which states had all of the power because they had a monopoly on force.
And now that we have all of these different non-state actors being able to marshal and field their own armies, so to speak, it changes the dynamic of world power and international relations.
So, I mean, there's many aspects of his book that I know you'd like to talk about in terms of the rise of the mercenary, which is the name of his book.
But I thought that was the most interesting because basically we've unleashed this, the United States, by outsourcing our wars.
And this is something that we can't put back into the box or the genie back into the bottle because now that it is so easy to field these private armies by anybody who has the money.
And we have not only unleashed the standards, but actual people we've trained who are out there and they are basically selling their skills to the highest bidder.
And so I think it's an interesting examination.
I think that your audience would be very interested in some of the research here.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if I could ever get to the book with this pile of books I got to get to, but it's certainly a great article to read.
And it's the kind of thing where, you know, I'm not sure if you I'm sure you must be somewhat familiar with William S. Lynn and what he's written in The American Conservative in the past about the rise of fourth generation warfare on the part of those who we keep conquering and occupying and regime changing, a.k.a. obliterating the states that they had lived under, like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and created the rise of these groups that are loyal to their religion or religious leaders or local tribal elders far before any kind of nation state.
And, you know, of course, the danger of that.
But so now this is sort of the American or the Western part in that.
And really, I guess you're talking about Africa throughout the Middle East and everywhere.
The rest of the reaction to that is really kind of professionalizing these forces, which, you know, I guess in many cases could challenge the supposed monopoly on power that many of these states or so-called states possess, like, say, I don't know, in some of these Gulf kingdoms or something like that.
What's the relative power between the hired Gestapo and the actual leaders, you know?
Right.
Exactly.
And that was his point.
He said, you know, you know, back before, you know, the rise of the power of the state, you had so many competing interests and allegiances, you know, from principalities to the papacy to bishops to feudal kings to, you know, you know, families fighting each other.
And, you know, that set the tone for the, you know, for relationships throughout the world order.
And after a series of agreements and pacts in the 17th century and beyond, you know, the sovereign state emerged where all of these private armies and mercenary, the mercenary system was ended.
It was ended because of the monopoly on force and driven underground.
We've always had military contractors.
But as Sean points out, that at least if we're just looking specifically at the United States military, in no war have we had this reliance on contractors.
There were contractors in World War II, for example, and in Korea, which is probably the one time where it actually rises closest to the level that we had in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But on the most part, we have not, we have created an actual market for mercenaries, what he calls enterprisers and mercenaries.
You know, Sean, you know, as I say in the book, he's an ex-contractor, an ex-soldier himself.
So, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't, you know, weigh in too definitely on whether it's a good or a bad thing.
He thinks that, you know, there's a difference between enterprisers, which is like the middleman.
Hey, I'm going to, you pay me, I'll raise you an army.
And the actual mercenaries who just basically are, you know, the higher guns.
That's a whole other debate.
I think you and I agree that this is, this is just a scary development, you know, in world history and our history.
So we'll just go with that.
But, you know, his point is, is that there is a market now that wasn't there before.
And in fact, he goes back to the 1980s when there was just this rush to privatization, which, you know, I agree.
You know, there's many, there are many swell arguments for free, free markets.
But it has been extended to our military.
And I don't think that that's such a good thing.
You know, that's the thing about it too, though, is, and I don't know a way around it, but there are two entirely different phenomena called privatization.
One of them is the government Fs off and leaves people alone.
And if there's a problem, the market handles it.
And the other is the government hires mercs to do their dirty work for them, which is an entirely different thing.
You know, when the government gives a monopoly to a company that only you get to provide cable service to everybody in this city or something like that.
That's a bad example.
Water is a would be a better example where you don't go from socialism to to a free market.
You go from socialism to fascism, which is not an improvement.
And that's really we're not talking about burn security in Stanley Smith Garden, the local mall.
We're talking about mercenary armies of basically ex-military killers now making a killing killing.
Right.
And he makes the great point that, you know, hiring, hiring private contractors to go out and represent the United States in these conflict zones allows the policymakers in Washington to conduct these operations in the streets.
Operations in the shadows.
So they aren't put up to public scrutiny.
There there isn't this sense of, oh, we're sending our our men and women to go fight, you know, in harm's way because most people don't care about contractors.
And so they don't they can't muster up the even interest when, you know, these contractors are fighting and dying under an American flag and some dark African nation.
So sorry, we got it.
We got to take this break.
But important point.
And we'll pick it up right there on the other side of this break.
Kelly Vallejos, the American conservative magazine, a Blackwater World Order.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Kelly Vallejos from the American conservative magazine.
This one is called a Blackwater World Order about the unleashing of the Mercs post Iraq war, especially there.
And now I'm sorry at the part where I had to interrupt you for the break there.
I could have probably given you five more seconds.
You were talking about how, hey, nobody cares at all about the mercs.
Nobody cries a tear for the mercs.
So it's they're sort of like drones in the sense that, yeah, they become that much easier to wage war with.
Makes waging war that much easier when you have them to do it.
Yeah, I mean, if you're if you were national security policy is to extend the footprint in the Middle East, North Africa, these other conflict areas where you have convinced lawmakers and the American people there is a danger of Islamic insurgency, sending contractors out to do, you know, the work of soldiers is a great way of conducting these operations without having to face public scrutiny about what is happening.
If we're wasting our money, if we're wasting our lives, blood and treasure.
And so for as much as the United States might lament, you know, the fact that we have unleashed these this mercenary culture, we are embracing it ourselves.
They're not going anywhere.
So I feel that is another black stain on our record, because we have found a way to fight wars without without the transparency that we should be demanding of our military.
So I find that that's just a very disheartening development here.
And I don't think Sean McVeigh, the author of the book that I based this on or anybody else has any illusions about that at all or about it ending anytime soon, particularly as like you said, there is this fourth generation warfare going on, a regular warfare.
You know, McVeigh had, you know, he said, you know, this this is an era of irregular warfare, more than regular warfare.
And I think the United States being able to command these private armies is in the best place to in the best position to fight them.
You know, so there you have it.
Yeah, that was what Bill O'Reilly said.
Just send some mercenaries.
That way, the guys we want to get killed get killed, but we don't care about the guys that we lose.
Simple Fox News logic right there.
Inescapable logic, in fact, from the empire's point of view, I guess.
But, you know, we saw, too, I guess there's an exception is some of the Blackwater guys from the Nisour Square massacre ended up being convicted.
And we do see that from specialists, you know, in the army from time to time as well.
Hardly ever officers.
But for the most part, it seemed like the real my real memory of Blackwater's role and the other mercenaries role in the war was because they were private.
But on the government contract, they had even more immunity, secrecy, impunity to get away with bloody murder than the army did.
And there's hardly any accountability in the army whatsoever.
But all the courts would say, hey, I guess it's up to Iraqi courts to prosecute them.
And the Iraqi courts would say, yeah, that'd be great if, you know, your special forces didn't evacuate them right out of the country every time we wanted to arrest them, obviously.
And so they were in this kind of legal black hole, the opposite of the Guantanamo Bay kind, the kind where they get away with anything.
Yeah.
And I don't know if you've been seeing this story across last week.
But, you know, Khaki, the private contractor based here in Washington that was involved in fielding these interrogators at Abu Ghraib, is being sued right now by the Iraqis who were tortured there.
And their defense is, hey, we're under military contract, so we have immunity.
And so I'm going to push forward and try to do a story on that, because I find it very interesting that we have a policy that most people at this point would say is torture.
You know, the interrogation policies, practices that we pursued in that war and in Afghanistan and throughout the war on terror, we're learning so much about it now.
I mean, we don't know how, you know, if there will be any accountability here in Washington.
But here we have two private contractors who basically push the soldiers to torture Iraqis.
They're being sued by the Iraqis.
What happens to them now?
Like you said, there's this legal black hole gray area that's playing out right now.
So their defense is, well, we're under military contract.
Basically, we're, you know, we are military.
And that's the same thing that, you know, the contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq that had been supposedly, you know, putting up the incinerators are saying and didn't.
And all our troops are sick from the burn pits out there.
They say, hey, we're under military contract.
We're immune.
So I'm interested in pursuing that story at some point.
Yeah, they're like honorary cops.
They can get away with whatever they want.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you talk about how, boy, and it's not going away, not going away.
I'm trying to come up with a way to make it go away.
And I'm not for the nation state, but I'm for libertarianism instead.
Not, you know, massive chaos and destruction and warfare in the place of these former monopolies, which is what we're talking about here with these mercenary armors.
Armies.
Brave New World versus Jihad, says William S.
But anyway, what it would take to get rid of them just even in the short term, never mind libertarianism, but just getting rid of these mercenary groups.
It would take some kind of new treaty, right?
And a whole new policy adopted by America, where they forced the U.N. to force the whole world to accept some treaty that says you're not going to hire these guys anymore.
And that, no, you'll just use regular state forces as bad as they are.
Yeah.
But that's not going to happen in a million years.
It's not because, you know, as Sean points out in the book, that there, you know, a lot of these countries and regions have been hiring private contractors to guard their shipping on the high seas against pirates.
And they've been very, actually been very successful at it.
Do you think they're going to give up protecting, A, their corporate interests or, B, their sovereign interests of their state, you know, for some higher treaty?
No, because they found a way to beat back the pirates without having to expend, you know, soldiers and their own navies.
So that's not going to happen.
And you have, like I mentioned before, you have, you know, you have monarchs like in Bahrain, you know, in places like Abu Dhabi who have active insurgencies or active, you know, revolts.
They're hiring private contractors, you know, private security detail.
You know, so these guys aren't going to turn around and say, well, yeah, you're right.
You know, we can't hire these guys because in many cases, they need to buy, they're buying trust.
They're buying people that they can trust.
They're buying people who they know are effective.
A lot of these people have been trained in the Afghan and Iraqi battlefields.
So, I mean, another point that he's made is that once we start training mercenaries, and a lot of these are multinationals that have been working for us in wars, they go off and they start their own companies.
You know, so they have the skills that we gave them.
They go off, they start their own teams, their own, you know, private groups that are hiring themselves out.
So, we've not only made it a standard, we've also trained, you know, these people to go out and make, to build their own, you know, capital out there.
So, that's another issue.
And it's interesting that, you know, in absence of the empire, for example, the American Navy patrolling the entire world all day, it would make a lot of sense for companies like Walmart, for example, to have to hire their own security.
If they want to ship a bunch of goods from slaves in China back and forth all day, then let them.
Why should they be able to socialize their security costs on everyone else?
But unfortunately, we're not talking about that sort of all things being equal free market sort of argument at all.
We're talking about the aftermath of the Iraq war where there's a million of these things and they're, you know, sprouting up all over the place and they're at the higher of the states mostly.
And, you know, pretty much define corruption rather than any kind of, you know, placing the burden on companies to take care of themselves.
It's more, you know, again, comparing the burn security versus Blackwater there.
None of Burns even exists anymore.
Right.
But, I mean, you know, that's an excellent point.
And, you know, you know, just taking the example of Afghanistan, you know, we are our military in Afghanistan helped create, you know, private mercenary groups and operations at the warlord level.
So, I mean, how do you get rid of that?
Because at that point, it is so ingrained into the regional politics, into the regional, you know, system.
And you can sign all the treaties you want.
But once we have gotten in there and we gave the blessing to these warlords to basically become, you know, private mercenary groups themselves to hire out their own fighters to protect, you know, villages and protect interests there.
You know, that's not something you're going to easily, you know, you're usually just going to drive underground with some treaties and agreements or codes of conduct.
And I think that was his point.
You know, there's been attempts to establish some sort of code of conduct for private enterprises that have been fielding these armies and raising armies for governments and corporations.
But, you know, making everybody, you know, subject to this would be impossible because it's gone down to the granular level and people are just hiring themselves out.
And, you know, his point was, well, you can make, you can try to let the market decide and establish some standards.
And as United States government will only hire and work with those groups that, you know, live up to those standards.
But, you know, the government itself is obviously in so many ways responsible for this because, you know, they treated Blackwater and DynCorp and some of these bigger contractors as their only source.
You know, there was not a wide bidding war for these contracts.
They constantly went back to DynCorp.
They gave them billions of dollars through these two wars.
I'm sorry, Kelly.
I got to interrupt you and stop.
I'm over time and I got to go to my next guest.
But you're so great and I appreciate your time on the show as always.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
Appreciate it.
And sorry, everybody, for cutting her off because I want to hear the rest of what she has to say too.
But go read the article.
It's a Blackwater World Order.
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