Our Hessians

In the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson penned a blistering attack against King George III, condemning him for deploying Hessian mercenaries to “complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny” begun the year before by the British army on Lexington Green. Jefferson calculated this sensational passage of the Declaration of Independence for effect. He knew that it would inflame the passions of patriots immersed in a republican political tradition that stretched back to England’s own mid-seventeenth century revolution. At a critical point in this Old World struggle, soldiers in the “New Model Army” issued their own declaration, disclaiming that they were a “mere mercenary army” while proclaiming to the world that they fought for republican principles and not for plunder. Indeed, the democratic spirit of the New Model lived on in popular memory during the American Revolution, when colonial liberty mobs elected “Cornet Joyce, Junior” as their fictional commander. As both patriots and imperial officials knew, the real Cornet Joyce, without orders and at the head of a troop of New Model volunteers, had captured King Charles I in the name of the people in 1647.

The declarations of both Jefferson and the New Model Army rejected the long-standing policies of European monarchs. Rightly suspicious of their people’s loyalties, royal heads of state traditionally hired foreign mercenaries to fight wars abroad and to suppress dissent at home. Funding their mercenaries through crippling taxes, monarchs and their courts grew wealthy through wars of conquest that kept their people politically and financially powerless. Fighting against Hessian soldiers of fortune, colonial patriots envisioned a state free from this tyranny and corruption. Private armies would have no place in the free Republic.

Recent events involving Blackwater, USA have brought the issue of private armies back to the forefront of American politics and have raised important questions about their current place within the American military. Are these forces “private contractors” as the Bush administration insists, or even “patriots” and “heroes” in the war on terror? Conversely, are they “mercenaries,” soldiers of fortune who fight for pay first and principles second, if at all? And as one Republican recently claimed in Congress, is Blackwater on “our team” in a war that the administration has defined as a cosmic battle of good vs. evil?

While they do employ retired U.S. soldiers, it is clear that Blackwater and other corporate purveyors of military labor are not on “our team.” They are on the side of profits, which they have made in abundance in no-bid and competitive contracts during the Iraqi war. Furthermore, rejecting the term mercenary to avoid politicizing the Blackwater scandal assumes that choosing the administration’s terminology lacks a politics of its own.

By following the Bush team’s lead here, we become unwitting allies in their war against the American military, a war where administration policy-makers wield language like a lethal weapon against evidence and clear thinking. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war against the Pentagon in September 2001, the day before it was attacked by Al Queda. In this speech, Rumsfeld vowed not to destroy the Department of Defense, but to recreate it in the image of corporate America. But as few fully understood, Rumsfeld aimed at more than infusing private sector savvy into an “outmoded bureaucracy.”

Rumsfeld’s ultimate goal, shared by others within elite neoconservative circles, lay in making corporate America an official part of the military establishment. Rumsfeld achieved this goal. Now incorporated within the military’s “total force,” private contractors provide a wide range of combat and non-combat services for the United States government. With this victory, de-regulating traditional military restrictions to allow these private contractors more operational flexibility, so the neocons thought, would enable the state to better meet the new challenges of a post Cold War world.

In truth, private sector “flexibility” in the military has failed to meet the nation’s biggest post-Cold War challenge, the Iraqi insurgency. As many of our generals in Iraq have repeatedly stated, the war can only be won politically, with force of arms as one important means to this end. Blackwater and its corporate ilk, operating under military de-regulation and with callous disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians, have become a political liability. Fueling anti-Americanism and hampering the war effort, these mercenaries have also placed the lives of our traditional soldiers in even greater jeopardy. As one military official has said, the Iraqi backlash to the September Blackwater shootings “may be worse than Abu Ghraib.”

Customarily undeterred by evidence, President Bush seeks to expand the amount of privatized troops within the military’s total force. Why? Perhaps because using “private contractors” keeps boots on the ground during a war when the military continually falls short of recruiting goals.

Although it’s losing the war, the administration realizes that “support the troops” sloganeering can still mobilize the conservative base for the 2008 elections, as long as it can avoid calling a draft. Committing political suicide through the draft would diminish the support the administration still enjoys from heroic hawks who continue to sacrifice for the cause by sopping up unprecedented wartime tax cuts. Moreover, the draft might have the unfortunate effect of inspiring Young Republicans to desert en masse to the forces of cut-and-run. This would liquidate the critical voting mass of conservative campus warriors, who instead of enlisting to become troops themselves, “support” the troops by fiercely waving flags in epic engagements with America’s enemies, as we all observed during Islamo-Fascism Awareness week.

Like despots of old, President Bush and neoconservative policy-makers understand that an increasingly privatized army allows them to pursue unpopular ventures overseas while avoiding political fallout at home. Perhaps the expansion of America’s mercenary brigades will allow this administration or its successor to wage war in Iran without drafting troops into the traditional forces. But what the administration can reap by advancing its own ideological agenda, the American people lose in the way of a military designed to serve the public good.