Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Steele played a similar role with U.S.-trained Iraqi forces in the early days of the occupation and was central to a program some refer to as the “Salvadorization of Iraq.” 61Under this strategy, “U.S. soldiers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role,” wrote Peter Maass in The New York Times Magazine . “In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main adviser; having been a central participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces.” 62

After the Blackwater ambush, Steele claimed his “undercover” mission in Fallujah in April 2004 was to recover the corpses of the Blackwater men and to “assess the enemy situation.” 63Shortly after that mission, he laid out what he thought should happen. “In Fallujah, a heavy hand makes sense,” he said. “That’s the only thing some of those guys will understand. Down south, too [where the United States faced a mounting Shiite rebellion]. We can’t be seen as weak. Otherwise, this kind of thing can happen everywhere.” 64The “city of mosques” would soon find itself under siege as Bremer’s dreams of “cleaning out” Fallujah found their justification. While U.S. commanders readied their troops to attack, Blackwater’s stock was rising in Washington, and Erik Prince’s men would soon find themselves in the middle of the second major resistance front exploding against the occupation—this time in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

AS THEMarines began preparing to invade Fallujah, back in Washington, D.C., Erik Prince’s stock was rising dramatically. In a matter of days, Prince and other Blackwater executives would be welcomed on Capitol Hill as special guests of some of the most powerful and influential Republican lawmakers—the men who literally ran Congress—where Blackwater would be hailed as a “silent partner” in the war on terror. 1As his schedule began to fill, Prince found himself monitoring yet another crisis with his mercenaries at the center. But unlike Fallujah, where the deaths of four Blackwater men had provided the spark for a U.S. onslaught, this time Blackwater forces would be active combatants in the fighting, engaging in a day-long battle against hundreds of followers of the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Blackwater had been contracted to guard the U.S. occupation authority’s headquarters.

In the weeks preceding the March 31 Fallujah ambush, the Bush administration had been building toward an intense crackdown on Sadr, whom Bremer and the White House viewed as an obstacle to the central U.S. goal at the time—the so-called “handover of sovereignty” scheduled for June 2004. The son of a revered religious leader assassinated by Saddam’s forces, Sadr had emerged in occupied Iraq as commander of the Mahdi Army—named for a Shiite messiah—and perhaps the most vocal and popular opponent of the U.S. occupation. 2The administration and Bremer believed that like the rebellious Sunnis of Fallujah, Sadr and his insurgent Shiite movement had to be stopped. In April 2004, as the U.S. launched simultaneous counterinsurgency wars in Iraq against the country’s main Sunni and Shiite resistance movements, Blackwater would play a decisive role in perhaps the most pivotal moments of the Iraq occupation, a period that would irreversibly alter the course of the war and go down as the moment the anti-U.S. insurrection exploded.

While the killing of the Blackwater men in Fallujah grabbed international headlines for days and is remembered as an iconic moment of the war, the significant role of Blackwater’s forces in Najaf during the Shiite uprising five days later was barely noticed at all. And yet this episode, which found Blackwater mercenaries commanding active-duty U.S. soldiers in battle, starkly dramatized the unprecedented extent to which the Bush administration had outsourced the war. Like the ambush in Fallujah, the fate of Blackwater in Najaf was guided by history.

During his year in Iraq, Paul Bremer presided over various U.S. policies that greatly accelerated the emergence of multiple antioccupation resistance movements. In April 2004, it all came to a head. “The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920,” wrote veteran British war correspondent Robert Fisk from Fallujah. “The Americans are achieving this in just under a year.” 3The disbanding of the Iraqi military combined with the firing of thousands of state employees under Washington’s “de-Baathification” program had put tens of thousands of Iraqi men of fighting age out of work and into the resistance. Iraqis watched as foreign corporations—most of them based in the United States—fanned out across their country to reap enormous profits while ordinary Iraqis lived in squalor and insecurity. What’s more, victims of U.S. crimes had almost no recourse as contractors were basically immunized from domestic prosecution, giving the overwhelming appearance of total impunity. 4

At the same time, the dire humanitarian situation in the country and killings and disappearances of Iraqi civilians had opened the door for religious leaders to offer security and social services in return for loyalty. This phenomenon was perhaps seen most clearly in the ascent of Muqtada al-Sadr to the status of a national resistance hero. In the chaos and horror that followed “Shock and Awe,” Sadr was one of the few figures within the country actually addressing the extreme poverty and suffering, establishing a sizable network of social institutions in his areas of influence, among them the vast Baghdad slum of Sadr City, whose 2 million residents had long been neglected by Saddam’s regime. At a time when Bremer’s de-Baathification was dismantling social institutions and protections, Sadr’s network was building alternatives and winning thousands of new followers. “Immediately after the invasion, Mr. Sadr deployed black-clad disciples to patrol the streets of Baghdad’s Shiite slums,” reported the New York Times . “His men handed out bread, water and oranges. They also provided much-needed security. Mr. Sadr had seen a void and filled it.” 5While other religious and political figures vied for power within the new U.S.-created institutions, Sadr rejected all components and supporters of the U.S. regime. In August 2003, his militia numbered roughly five hundred members. By April 2004, it had swelled to an estimated ten thousand. 6

Sadr’s rising credibility and popularity, combined with his fierce rhetoric against the occupation—and Bremer in particular—would soon earn him the U.S.-imposed label of “outlaw.” 7With the June 2004 “deadline” fast approaching, the United States believed that, like the militant Sunnis of Fallujah, Sadr had to be stopped.

Washington had long viewed Sadr as a primary enemy in the “new” Iraq, and top U.S. officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the senior commander in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, had for months discussed plans to neutralize him. “There was a conclusion early on that this guy was trouble and needed to be contained,” a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post . “But there was not a clear plan on how to go about it.” 8That changed in March 2004, when Bremer launched his all-out war on Sadr, his institutions, and his followers. As Bremer and the Bush administration engaged in a major propaganda campaign leading up to the “handover,” Sadr was railing against the occupation and its collaborators within the country. He was calling for the United States to pull out and had declared his Mahdi Army the “enemy of the occupation.” 9Sadr was not just a Shiite religious figure; he was also an Iraqi nationalist who spoke the language of the streets, often peppering his sermons with slang and cultural references.