The likes of Blackwater don't mix well with the general population. Medieval England worked it out 500 hundred years ago. There's a reason why private armies were outlawed by Act of Parliament.........called the Wars of the Roses.
OT, The Dutch were stonking tonight against the Italians. 3-0!! The team to beat.
does this continue if the Dems get into office -- can they stop this mess
the indoor training facility has been set to go through. there really doesn't look like anything can be done. the deal was made and it looks like the only possible thing is to allow the indoor facility and be done with it.
blackwater is have an outdoor, huge scale operation scotched by the small towns of campo and la posta (good on the kumayaay indins for standing tall, they remembered that once they were warriors).
they had plans for a facility to rival the scope and size of their north carolina operation's headquarters. they tried to sneak the plans through and skirt the environmental and community impact reports (they figured if they told the locals "you can use our swimming pool and bowling alley for free" the locals wouldn't complain about people ranging through the hills on live fire exercises)
distributorcap-
The private facility is not being paid with our tax funds directly. Gator is saying that the US paid taxpayer money to Blackwater for private contractor services in Iraq and Blackwater is using the profits made in Iraq to build this facility.
Yes, the Dems can stop this by ending our involvement in Iraq.
Blackwater-Maintaining the right of Americans to screw each other with multi-level marketing scams.
Sorry to interrupt the current discussion, but I thought y'all might like to know that Dennis Kucinich is currently reading articles of impeachment against Bush on the grounds of violating posse comitatus on the House floor, live on C-Span as I type this.
It probably won't go anywhere, but good on Dennis for doing it...and hey, if Henry Rollins doesn't want to be Obama's VP, perhaps Dennis might accept the position?...
No, Rosali.
The Dems can't stop this.
Maybe they can stop Blackwater.
But the problems surrounding the use of mercs and private armies are going to be with us for at least a generation.
That's what the betrayal of the volunteer army in the Iraq War has bought us. Betrayal is never a good bargain.
Iraq was our Adrianople.
After all, when this country goes to hell and gone our new feudal overlords in their gated communities are going to have to have SOMEONE to protect them, considering that neither the Army nor the local constabulary may be around to protect them and theirs...
Just sayin'.
the problem is that not only are mercenary armies ineffective, they need money - sweet, sweet, money - to survive. No mo' money, no mo' mercs.
Right now, the repubs are pushing money at the merc companies, but that well is about to run dry.
once that well is dry, the problem will correct itself -- with a little help from Judge Lynch
just saying.
"Right now, the repubs are pushing money at the merc companies, but that well is about to run dry.
once that well is dry, the problem will correct itself -- with a little help from Judge Lynch"
Not necessarily, ceabaird.
Remember how the Legions jumped the tracks, in the runup to the Third Century Crisis?
That was all about money. Every time a new civil war broke out, the generals on both sides secured the allegiance of their legions by "donatives".
The size of these kept on rising. And the influence of the legions, which were regularized mercs after Marius' reforms, kept on increasing.
The story about Claudius being chosen as Caesar by the Praetorian Guard is a bit overdone, because he was in fact just about the only Julio-Claudian left by that time.
But by 275 AD, the army was murdering Caesars and raising them up as a matter of routine. That's how Aurelian both succeeded to the throne and was killed.
By the time Septimus Severus was running things, matters were to the point where a reasonable man, as Caesar, would kill first and ask questions later if he even so much as suspected breach of loyalty.
Since we're stuck with merc troops for the time being, we'd do well to think on how they should be controlled. Unless we want to play "musical governments", garnished with the occasional civil war.
Stormcrow,
Americans don't do real history well. Hagiography, fine. History, not so much. That's "ivory tower egghead stuff," not at all practical.
The Bush administration is starting to wrap things up and pay off their real constituents, among them the mercenaries. The understanding is that the American presence in Iraq will be scaled back, so the move will be to refocus on the domestic market.
For the mercenaries, part of this payoff is government subsidized training facilities to produce guards for domestic gated communities. The US itself will become a gated community on the global scale, and I have no doubt that one of the last acts of the Bush administration (if they haven't done so already) will be to authorize the use of armed private contractors to supplement the border service (especially in expanded detention facilities).
And that's only the short term historical view of what's going on. The long term consequences of allowing the use of private armies are in some ways even clearer. Democrats in power or not, America will be paying for Bush administration policies in Iraq for decades to come.
"The long term consequences of allowing the use of private armies are in some ways even clearer."
Yeah.
Those are precisely the consequences I'm talking about.
Whether we employ these people on domestic soil or foreign soil, we have to start thinking about their oversight and control.
Right now.
We are NOT really good at problems of oversight and control, historically.
But if we fuck this one up, the "cost", as you put it, will be a hell of a lot more horrifying to deal with, than the merc problem that's on the table right now.
"Whether we employ these people on domestic soil or foreign soil, we have to start thinking about their oversight and control."
I can guarantee you that people are thinking about that right now. Unfortunately, they're the same people are employing and subsidizing Prince and similar creatures in the first place. Their version of oversight and control has very little to do with loyalty to the law, and a lot to do with loyalty to men and their ideology.
But as to people of goodwill ...
"We are NOT really good at problems of oversight and control, historically."
We are good at it, but only after disaster strikes. The whole history of American market reform is basically letting greedheads push and push their instruments and mechanisms far past the point where they're useful innovations and barrier-lowering disruptors. Then things collapse, followed by the government rushing in with expensive bailouts and strict regulation. The only Presidents who've been aggressive about addressing such potential problems before they got insanely out of control were both named Roosevelt.
The US has been very lucky so far, but for the past 25 years successive governments has decided to enable and integrate with the greedheads in very sophisticated and wide-ranging ways (think Gilded-Age government with modern management methods and technologies). We're reaching the point where that approach will start knocking out integral failsafes built into government.
THe use of mercenaries is a good example. The Green Zone in Baghdad was test market #1, and it's no coincidence that the border is intended as the second test market. A lot of American citizens don't understand that their Constitutional rights get a little ... hazy at the border (the 4th Amendement in particular). so it's a good low-liability environment for authoritarian public-private experiments like this one. The next step, already in process, is to "harmonize" border practices with those in domestic airports.
I don't think Obama can reverse this momentum, but he can make a start at slowing it to a crawl by reviewing all those Bush signing statements.
Stormcrow, the legions jumping ship were doing so because there never really was any clearly defined rule of succession in the Roman Empire, even while it was still pretending to be a "Republic."
This confusion set up every general with a legion at his back to offer stability and prosperity with his rule delusions of grandeur.
Some of them could pull it off (Vespasian, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius) while others couldn't (Galba, Commodus).
Comparing ourselves to the Roman Empire is a little overblown, and it really wasn't until the end of the Western Empire, when the legionary system had broken down and mercenary foreign troops were the norm, that things were lost. Often the "barbarians" invading had lived trained and fought with the Romans, often with their leaders serving the Romans as officers.
The merc heyday in renaissance Italy was seen as a disaster by the master of "rule of force over law" Nicolo Machiaveli:
Machiavelli takes a strong stance against the use of mercenary forces, troops that are hired to fight for a wage. He believes mercenary forces are useless to a ruler because they are undisciplined, cowardly, and without any loyalty. Their only motivation to fight is for money. Machiavelli attributes the Italian city states' weakness to the reliance on mercenary armies.
'nuff said.
My point was very simple. If the US ends its involvement in Iraq, a war of choice, it'll end Blackwater's ability to profit from taxpayer money spent on the Iraq war.
Ceabaird, I usually defer to Ser Niccolo when it comes to such topics as mercenaries, as he hits the nail on the head every single time.
And on a lighter note:
Spain beating Russia 2-0 at the half. Viva Espana!
Great article on Blackwater in The Nation: Blackwater's Private Spies.
Nice performance by Spain! 4-1, demonstrating the power of the quick counterattack.
And the Dutch spanking the Italians 3-0. Talk about your quick counterattacks!!
Looks like Greece are going down the tubes....... 0-2 to Sweden. Great goal by Ibrahimovic. The second was something of a fumble, but the better team definitely won.
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