Civilian Reserve Corps?
365 words.
One other part of the State of the Union address that jumped out at me was the president’s call for a Civilian Reserve Corps:
“A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but after some Googling today, it turns out Bush was basically talking about private mercenaries. It’s not generally known (and even I was surprised at the total number), but the U.S. is already employing a rather large force of private mercenaries in Iraq. There are some 48,000, according to an article in the LA Times: Our mercenaries in Iraq. Each mercenary earns some $1000 a day, which is a lot more than an American soldier earns.
No wonder the war is costing so much.
The LA Times notes that many of these mercenaries come from a place called Blackwater USA, which I’ve heard passing references to before. Blackwater USA sounds essentially like a private army operating out of North Carolina. Sisyphus reports there are some 20,000 soldiers employed by Blackwater. I find the existence of such a large private militia one state away from me rather disturbing. Mainly because these Blackwater guys sound eerily similar in concept to the state-within-a-state operations of, eg., Nasrallah’s Hezbollah militia in Lebanon or al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Baghdad. The only difference is that Blackwater happens to be on the same page as the U.S. Government. For now.
Maybe Bush’s Civilian Reserve Corps is an attempt to put Blackwater under some kind of government control. If so, I like the sound of it. A group of 20,000 rogue, unsupervised mercenaries running around North Carolina (with air support!) is not something to be ignored.
Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a generally centrist commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.
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