DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 7/9/04

For back issues of Dead Parrot and

Dead Parrot Bulletin, visit

PARSING MICHAEL

A phrase that has repeatedly surfaced in critiques of Fahrenheit 9/11 is "cheap shots," perhaps borrowed from the same lexicon that tagged Al Gore as a "sore loser" four years ago and hailed the Bush pre-emptive war doctrine as "robust foreign policy." The language is meant to suggest a manly respect for the rules of engagement and the facts of life--no sissies, no whining, no low blows or sand in the eyes. (Whether one should be a cheerful loser when one has actually been victimized by dishonest practice, as Gore was by the Republican machine in Florida, is the kind of complex question that this kind of talk prefers never to address.)

Fahrenheit is far from a perfect film. Its chief defect is that Moore diffuses his attention by trying to cover too much ground, leaving some points thin and tenuous and robbing the narrative of unity. Bush family connections with the Carlyle Group and through it with the Saudi plutocracy, for example, could be the subject of an entire movie. But although the evacuation of the bin Ladens a few days after the 9/11 attacks may be a red herring, the theme of how the Bushes' business dealings have corrupted American policy is not irrelevant, as some have claimed; Moore simply doesn't develop it in enough depth. (For some insight into Carlyle, see the review of Dan Briody's The Iron Triangle in DP #32.) The streams of jingoistic propaganda issuing from Fox News would also make great documentary material. Much of it already has the tinny, hysterical quality of the 1950's "information" films and newsreels collected in The Atomic Cafe. Again, Moore touches on the point but doesn't linger to nail it down.

[I have just now learned that Fox is indeed the focus of Robert Greenwald's soon-to-be-released Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on

Journalism.]

What, though, of those famous cheap shots? "Everyone who goes on television gets made up," sniffs the New Yorker's literal-minded David Denby (6/28) in dismissing Moore's footage of administration officials being slicked and powdered for the camera. But few administrations have approached image-making with the same single-minded superficiality (think: Bush's profile meticulously aligned with those of the Mount Rushmore Four), and the make-up scenes are a visual metaphor for this point. Then there's the notorious seven-minute gap in the Florida schoolroom. Can anyone argue that nothing is to be learned about Bush's character from that pole-axed stare and that reflexive reversion to script--even when the script happened to be "My Pet Goat"? This is no innocuous presidential slip of the tongue; it's a popped fuse at a critical moment.

In any case, the most devastating shots in Fahrenheit resist the "cheap" label because they are self-inflicted. As in a vaudeville act, Moore simply steps aside and lets Bush's people smack themselves in the chops. When Rumsfeld says, "We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are" and then describes a geographical area half the size of Iraq, the lie is so transparent as to need no commentary. You'd know he was lying even if you didn't know that no weapons have ever been found. My favorite item of this type, however, is not a lie but an uncharacteristic admission of the truth. Bush himself, in white tie, addresses a fund-raiser: "An impressive crowd tonight--the haves and the have-mores. Some would call you the elite. I call you my base." In a week when Kenneth Lay, former Enron CEO and Bush Pioneer, is indicted on 175 years' worth of business fraud charges, this line resonates as sharply as any in the film--a reminder, in Bush's own words, of the class interests he represents. When reporters approached Bush for a comment on the indictment, he walked away without answering (Boston Globe, 7/8). We have Michael Moore to thank for a rare moment of candor in which Bush acknowledges what the Lays of the world have meant to him. Now that he's wearing bracelets, "Kenny Boy" may have metamorphosed from crony to non-person; but there are plenty more where he came from. A recent report in MSN Money reveals that CEO pay rose 27% in 2003.

DP REVIEWS

How many Americans have been killed in Iraq? The answer depends on how you count them. With the 21 deaths recorded since the beginning of this month, the toll of American troops now stands at 881. Their names and faces can be found at

But many more dead remain uncounted and unacknowledged. These are people like the four Blackwater "contractors" whose bodies were dragged through the streets of Fallujah in March and the three KBR employees recently lost to a roadside bomb and a mortar attack (Houston Chronicle, 6/22 & 7/6). That such casualties don't register in the tallies most people see is one of the chief benefits to our government in its policy of outsourcing war--a trend traced in detail by P. W. Singer in his fascinating Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003). Singer reveals that between 1994 and 2002, the US entered 3000 contracts worth a total of over $300 billion with private military firms (PMFs). How far these numbers have risen since Halliburton and its ilk boarded the Iraq gravy train is anyone's guess.

Singer's book is an academic study--careful, thorough, even-handed, and exhaustively sourced. It takes pains to set its subject in a historical context and to examine objectively the industry's claims to legitimacy. Through much of history, Singer points out, military force tended to be a specialty for hire. Many of the wars of antiquity were fought by hired hands. In the Middle Ages, "free lances"--often with expertise in such sophisticated weapons as the crossbow--banded into "companies" that traveled to hotspots looking for work; Swiss pikemen had a big chunk of the market, as reflected in the maxim "Pas d'argent, pas de Suisses." Rulers preferred hiring out to arming their own people, who might get uppity. So long as the mercenaries, with their nasty habit of plundering any area where they happened to be quartered, could be kept busy in foreign parts, all was well. Only with the American and French revolutions did the tide turn toward citizen armies and the state begin to assert the monopoly on violence that most of us now regard as the norm.

The end of the Cold War has again shifted the paradigm. In the first place, it has lifted the lid on local conflicts that the US and the Soviets tended (with some notable exceptions) to suppress in the interests of stability. Too, it has flooded the field with demobilized soldiers looking for something lucrative to do and with a spate of surplus weaponry at bargain-basement prices. (In Uganda, according to Singer, an AK-47 can be had for the price of a chicken; at this rate, a few hundred million goes a long way.) Coupled with the recent surge in privatizing as a political philosophy, these conditions have nurtured hundreds of PMF start-ups in the past 15 years.

What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to the PMFs, who claim that they can get a variety of jobs done more cost-effectively than public forces and that they are available for "resolving conflicts" in parts of the world that the major powers have abandoned to chaos. The complexity of the latter point in practice is illustrated by the story of a firm with the butter-wouldn't-melt-in-its-mouth name "Executive Outcomes." Founded and staffed by members of the most vicious units in the South African military under apartheid, EO was nevertheless extolled as a savior when it successfully defended the government of Sierra Leone from still more vicious (but less militarily competent) rebels in 1995. A British businessman bankrolled the intervention in return for diamond concessions. After EO left the scene, the government was driven into exile and the country's nightmare resumed.

The slippery moral footing of the PMF concept has led its proponents to some remarkable exploits in linguistic camouflage. In short, these companies talk as if they were selling insurance or computer software. Lt.-Col. Tim Spicer, who founded the British firm Sandline after his opportunities for advancement in Her Majesty's Scots Guards ran out, typifies this stance in his autobiography, An Unorthodox Soldier (Mainstream Publishing, 1999). PMFs, Spicer writes, "are not 'arms dealers' per se but packaged services providers." He notes with satisfaction that the term "military consultant" has largely replaced "mercenary" in popular discourse and acknowledges that the shift is due in part "to an extensive public relations exercise that we have undertaken." (Elsewhere in the book, Spicer's language veers between Kiplingesque romanticism [Gurkha fighters are "doughty hillmen"; the Legionaires at Dien Bien Phu "fought to the last round"] and soldierly colloquialism [the British position in West Belfast is "on a very dodgy wicket"; the attack helicopters that Spicer unsuccessfully tried to sell to the government of Papua New Guinea are "kit"].)

Either Spicer or his ghost--"Writing a book goes against the grain," he tells us at the start--has produced an engaging story and a seductive case for PMFs. The operating principles of Sandline, as he enumerates them, include that the company will work only for "legitimate governments" (and then only for those he blithely calls the "good guys"); that it will do nothing illegal, even for them; that it will not undermine the foreign policies of "key Western nations"; and that it will abide by first-world military standards, including respect for human rights. Unfortunately, Spicer and Sandline did not always live up to these ideals. Singer points out that the Papua New Guinea contract lacked parliamentary approval and so upset the civil-military balance in the country that a mutiny resulted and the government fell. Despite never having delivered the goods, Sandline took the subsequent PNG leaders to international arbitration and extorted the remaining $18 million of its $36 million contract. Later, in the aftermath of EO's intervention and withdrawal, Sandline agreed to provide the Sierra Leone government-in-exile with about $10 million worth of "packaged services" in return for new diamond concessions in the $200 million range. This transaction turned out to violate a UN arms embargo, landing both Spicer and the British Foreign Office, which on some level had approved the deal, in the steamy waters of what came to be known as the "Sandline Affair."

One of the business advantages that PMFs enjoy, according to Singer, is that for all their corporate posturing they are often no more than a Rolodex laden with expertise. Thus they are mobile enough to get out of town ahead of the regulators if they have to, closing shop and reappearing later, in a more hospitable place and under a new name. A visit to the Sandline web site illustrates the first part of the process. All that's left there is a lugubrious admission of defeat: "On 16 April 2004, Sandline International announced the closure of the company's operations. The general lack of governmental support for Private Military Companies willing to help end armed conflicts in places like Africa, in the absence of effective international intervention, is the reason for this decision."

But then, just as you think Othello's occupation may really be gone, who should pop up in the Boston Globe on 6/22 but Lt.-Col. Tim Spicer, the CEO of Aegis Defense Services, a British firm that the Pentagon has just awarded a three-year cost-plus contract worth $293 million? The mission: to protect US project management officers in Iraq and coordinate the activities of no fewer than 50 other private security companies.

What's the matter with PMFs? The bottom line is that they are driven, ultimately, by the bottom line. Employees are responsible to the company, not--as soldiers are--to the public; and the company is responsible to profit. The profit motive means that no matter how scrupulous they may profess to be, many PMFs will take work where they can get it. This tendency applies not only to edgy firms like Sakina Security Ltd., a British outfit that offered a "Jihad Challenge Package" to radical Muslims, and Spearhead, an Israeli company that has armed and trained the forces of drug lords and right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia. It also applies to an impeccably businesslike and mainstream organization like our own MPRI, which is manned exclusively by veterans of the US military and boasts of having "more generals per square foot" than the Pentagon. Training by MPRI so buffed up the miserable Croatian army in 1995 that it was able to carry out a good old-fashioned Balkan slaughter among the Serbs. More recently, the company outlobbied Congressional opposition and signed a contract to provide a "National Security Enhancement Plan" for Equatorial Guinea, a state so repressive that gatherings of more than 10 people are illegal.

Even if its clients really are the "good guys," the profit motive also offers a PMF an incentive to cheat them. Often the competition that is supposed to make privatizing worthwhile does not exist, as Halliburton's notorious no-bid contracts illustrate. The cost-plus arrangement is an open invitation to let expenses spiral, and PMFs have not been above overstaffing or staffing with cut-rate incompetents. Here, the industry leader is DynCorp, which hired waitresses, security guards, cooks, and cashiers to service US combat planes and responded, when informed that some of its employees had set up a prostitution ring, by trying to fire the whistle-blower.

Abuses aside, we need to question the PMF phenomenon and question it hard. More than money is lost when we outsource our defense. However much we may dislike the idea of a draft, the citizen-soldier principle could be our last honest link with the violence done in our name--and our last chance to debate the need for that violence.