War as employment scheme.

You can go back to Shakespeare, and probably beyond that, to read the literature about war as a profiteers paradise. Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children is a great modern treatment of war profiteering (Brecht seemed to be pretty interested in the subject, as it appears also in A Man's A Man). Now, of course, the Bush Administration dispenses with the whole idea of the war profiteer as adjunct or side-effect of the war and in the process exposes them as one of the neocons' wet dreams of war: war as a tool to open markets.

The Washington Post reports today that the number of government contractors nearly equals the number of soldiers in Iraq. Apparently, there are 100,000 government contractors -- i.e. war profiteers -- tooling around Iraq, many of them performing functions that the army privatized a while ago such as feeding the troops. We all know about the sleazy contracts doled out to Haliburton (which, surprise, surprise, just happens to be Vice President Dick "The Puppetmaster" Cheney's old firm) that are costing the taxpayers billions, but that firm isn't the only pair of greedy hands looking to feed at the government's ill-watched trough:

In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, said it does not delineate its workforce by country but that it has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

And a bang-up job these contractors are doing. Blackwater USA is basically a mercenary firm, the type of guys who back in the 1980's were reading Soldier of Fortune and wishing they'd been around in the 1970's, when a mercenary could find ready work in any number of third world civilian repression operations.

"Government contractor" sounds so much better than "mercenary," though, doesn't it?