Dec 13, 2004
Blood Money: Invest Now!
The Spectator reports on a new British, private mercenary, corporation to rival Halliburton.
I wonder if Dick Cheney will like our coalition partners, the Brits, getting into the"gun for hire game." We keep saying that the Brits are the second largest force in Iraq, but the last time I checked"our" private armies, were up toward 30,000 with Halliburton & others training more each week.
These have a heavy South African, Israeli & Latin American mercenary contingent. I always liked the French for calling theirs, honestly, a"Foreign Legion."
In the meantime, CounterPoint, carried a piece about how our Marines around Pendleton and LeJeune, struggle on less than $1,400 a month, while prey to loan sharks.
The mercenaries make the big bucks, upward of $200,000 a year, and as some of our troops finish their enlistment, are signing up.
Last week Gary North's column mentioned the Iraq counterinsurgency in the context of the Apaches & the Winchester '73. I suspect he is unaware this was an early example of US government bureaucratic bungling. The Interior Dept. gave the Indians those guns to hunt game, and they sure did, the two-legged variety. Gen. Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, and the Territorial Governor of New Mexico Territory (the Brit imperialists tended to use civilians for this kind of governance) complained bitterly to the War Dept. about the old, single-shot, Civil War vintage rifles issued to his Territorial Militia, with which they were supposed to hunt the Indian raiders. In both Vietnam and now Iraq, we have ended up supplying the insurgents in a somewhat more indirect method.
Our private armies in Iraq use a bullet outlawed by the Geneva Convention, which we, of course, ignore in other respects as well. Manufactured in Arkansas, instead of wounding a person, it tends to cut him in half, much to the amazement of some of the first veteran soldiers who used it. It will be interesting to see what happens when the insurgents, excuse me,"terrorists," get hold of some of these cartridges.
I do think the slogan of the Neocons ought to be,"perpetual intervention for perpetual peace and democracy."
I wonder if Dick Cheney will like our coalition partners, the Brits, getting into the"gun for hire game." We keep saying that the Brits are the second largest force in Iraq, but the last time I checked"our" private armies, were up toward 30,000 with Halliburton & others training more each week.
These have a heavy South African, Israeli & Latin American mercenary contingent. I always liked the French for calling theirs, honestly, a"Foreign Legion."
In the meantime, CounterPoint, carried a piece about how our Marines around Pendleton and LeJeune, struggle on less than $1,400 a month, while prey to loan sharks.
The mercenaries make the big bucks, upward of $200,000 a year, and as some of our troops finish their enlistment, are signing up.
Last week Gary North's column mentioned the Iraq counterinsurgency in the context of the Apaches & the Winchester '73. I suspect he is unaware this was an early example of US government bureaucratic bungling. The Interior Dept. gave the Indians those guns to hunt game, and they sure did, the two-legged variety. Gen. Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, and the Territorial Governor of New Mexico Territory (the Brit imperialists tended to use civilians for this kind of governance) complained bitterly to the War Dept. about the old, single-shot, Civil War vintage rifles issued to his Territorial Militia, with which they were supposed to hunt the Indian raiders. In both Vietnam and now Iraq, we have ended up supplying the insurgents in a somewhat more indirect method.
Our private armies in Iraq use a bullet outlawed by the Geneva Convention, which we, of course, ignore in other respects as well. Manufactured in Arkansas, instead of wounding a person, it tends to cut him in half, much to the amazement of some of the first veteran soldiers who used it. It will be interesting to see what happens when the insurgents, excuse me,"terrorists," get hold of some of these cartridges.
I do think the slogan of the Neocons ought to be,"perpetual intervention for perpetual peace and democracy."