Blackwater Founder Wants Mercenaries to Fight ISIS War

The Islamic State (ISIS) is massacring people in
the strategic town of Kobani along the Syrian-Turkish border,
indicating that American airstrikes on the terrorist group were

not effective. Big-named pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Steven
Colbert have been
arguing about whether mercenaries should fight America’s war
against the Islamic State (ISIS). Now, the ex-chief of the
mercenary company formerly known as Blackwater has waded into the
debate, and he says absolutely they should.

Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founder of Blackwater (now
called Academi), writes in his
current company blog at Frontier Services Group “as someone who
spent many years operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other
underdeveloped countries facing existential security threats”:

The President’s current plan seems half-hearted at best.
American air power has significant reach and accuracy, but
ultimately will be unable to finish the job of digging ISIS out of
any urban centers where they may seek shelter amongst the populace.
Clearing operations ultimately fall to the foot soldier.

In spite of Barack Obama’s promises that American involvement in
Iraq will be limited, troops-on-the-ground is an increasingly
likely scenario. The Pentagon has said
as much.

Whose troops, though?  Prince says the Kurds can’t do much,
because “the U.S. State Department [is] blocking them from selling
their oil and from buying serious weaponry to protect their
stronghold and act as a stabilizing force in the region.” The Iraqi
military is broken. The Obama administration has $500 million for
moderate Syrian rebels, but deciding who is “moderate” is
easier said than done. The majority of American troops
don’t want  to fight this war.

Prince notes that “the American people are clearly
war-fatigued,” and he accuses the Defense Department of waging war
in “the most expensive ways.” He says that “a multi-brigade-size
unit of veteran American contractors or a multi-national force
could be rapidly assembled and deployed” to eliminate the ISIS
threat.

Of course, the elephant in the room is Blackwater’s track
record. In one incident in 2007 the company killed 17
civilians and injured 20 more in Baghdad. In two years’ time,
employees were “involved in 195 shootings,” having shot first in
163 of them. Wikileaks
exposed sordid details about civilian deaths in Afghanistan,
too. A Blackwater manager
threatened to kill a State Department auditor for raising
questions about the company’s practices.

Will the Obama administration bite anyway? The Daily
Beast
reported one month ago that the Pentagon had already some major
military contractors about estimated costs of fighting ISIS.
Academi already has a
$250 million contract with the CIA,
$92 million contract with the State Department, so it’s not
like the company is in bad standing with the federal
government.

If the White House does turn to private companies to fight ISIS,
some people will likely shriek “capitalism!” Those folk will have
to reconcile that notion with the fact that the business
opportunity only exists because of a massive government project
with ill-defined goals that has already cost nearly one billion
dollars and is
expected to cost billions more.