April 2004

Mercenaries and Kos

ArchPundit April 4, 2004 1 Comment

I generally avoid inside baseball on blogs, but Markos deserves an exception. The other day he wrote a post that was over the line by saying “Screw Them” in relation to the “civilian” employees in Fallujah.

The comment was offensive to me, I think the loss of any human life is nothing to dismiss. That said, we all say offensive things. I say offensive things in relation to human life on a fairly frequent basis, but I consider those sins. And I ask for forgiveness of those sins when I pray. Others, including Markos, don’t have the same faith and I am guessing he has his own way of dealing with saying something he regrets. I’ll leave that to him and his faith or lack of faith.

I take his explanation for the statement to heart. Inherent in his anger are two issues. One, these men were not soldiers, yet they received more attention than our soldiers in their deaths. Part of this was because they were considered civilians when in reality they are mercenaries. They were combatants just as soldiers are except they were fighting as part of the nation’s armed forces. They were a part of a company that like many companies that do this kind of work, provide shadow services, in shadowy situations, under shadowy legal situations in shadowy moral situations. Were these individuals taking part in some sort of illegal activity or were they a part of legitimate force protection in an undermanned military force? We don’t know, but we do know that special forces noncomms don’t join these organizations without understanding their past uses and make no mistake about it, those past uses include some very shady operations around the world.

Second, Markos originally grew up in El Salvador where these sorts of characters were not unknown. Between American advisors who were privately paid to death squad goons, mercenaries played especially ugly roles in the civil war there and elsewhere throughout Latin America.

If one simply buys the label ‘civilian’, for these types of workers, then Kos’ comments seem far beyond what any normal human would say. If one understands the role of these kind of contractors or more accurately, mercenaries, in US foreign policy, Kos’ comments are still unacceptable, but a hell of a lot more understandable when one considers it was a reaction that wasn’t thought out.

He retracted that statement. It should be done. What is most disturbing to me is that the person who led part of the effort to get his advertisers to discontinue their ads has this to say about Rachel Corrie:

Personally, I would not have gloated the way some people did – it is still sad that a young woman died in a pretty nasty way – but I can’t work up any righteous indignation about the gloating.

Rachel Corrie was stupid and naive, but she also was doing nothing more than a peaceful act of nonviolent resistance. She was not a combatant, though she certainly chose to put herself in harm’s way. But here, we see, a person who doesn’t think those who gloated over her death as bad as even Kos. Now say some of those retracted as Kos did, I could forgive that pretty easily, but this clown doesn’t even think that such gloating is all that bad. To be clear, to this clown, it isn’t about the loss of humanity in either case, it is about which side one is on–as if there are only two in the world.

To make it even worse, this guy seems to think that Little Green Footballs is some sort of sane site, when its sole purpose appears to be denigrating Islam and its adherents, Arabs, and anyone who doesn’t agree that Islam is the root of all problems. Sort of like taking Christian Reconstructionists and claiming they are representative of all Americans or all Christians–just hatred run amock.

Even better, he compares Kos to the Council of Conservative Citizens. You know, the clowns who grew out of an organization built on white supremacy compared to a guy who said one dumb thing. Oh, and one of the CofCC guys sent me this. Yeah, just the same.

To a larger point, military service is noble and it is noble because it is done in the context of duty to your country and in service of a cause greater than oneself. More important it is in context of following the rules of war and US law governing our soldiers to ensure that decisions made by members of the military are consistent with our morality. Contractor mercenaries are not bound by the sames rules, they are not fighting the same fight, and they don’t have the same checks on their behavior. Jan Schakowsky has led efforts to end the funding of these sorts of contractors. For that effort she deserves to be rewarded with campaign contributions. But don’t. Why not? She has no opposition, but Barack Obama does–click on the Obama pic at the right and donate! Or go down and give her more colleages through the DCCC.

As for my blog? I’m going to open up my ads to anyone. I used to have reservations about who might advertise and place restrictions on racists or others. No more. In fact, if the CofCC wants to place an ad on my site–fantastic! I can then use it to highlight their history of racism. As for individual candidates, I am pretty confident that my blog won’t be too out there for anyone. The only exceptions are when I post on strong separation of church and state and marriage, but frankly, Steve Chapman of the Trib and Slate argues the same things. If you won’t advertise in the Trib, don’t advertise here.