By July 2003, Bremer began referring to Iraq in the first-person plural. “We are eventually going to be a rich country,” Bremer said. “We’ve got oil, we’ve got water, we’ve got fertile land, we’ve got wonderful people.”31 According to Time magazine, he toured the Iraq National Museum that month, in the aftermath of the massive looting of Iraq’s national treasures—including by U.S. forces and journalists. As museum officials showed Bremer a collection of ancient gold and jewelry, Bremer quipped, “Which one can I take home for my wife?” As he made the remark, according to Time, “a member of his security detail interrupted, informing him of reports of four grenade attacks near Bremer’s palace headquarters. Minutes later Bremer climbed into a waiting SUV and headed back to the office, managing a few hurried handshakes as he left. Later that day a U.S. soldier was shot and killed while guarding the museum.”32
He also made no bones about his religious influences. Taking a page from the Christian zealot Gen. Jerry Boykin, Bremer spoke of his divine guidance. “There is no doubt in my mind that I cannot succeed in this mission without the help of God,” Bremer said a month after arriving in Baghdad. “The job is simply too big and complex for any one person, or any group of people to carry out successfully. . . . We need God’s help and seek it constantly.”33 This perspective seemed to be a family affair. Bremer’s brother Duncan ran for Congress in 2006 in the home district of James Dobson’s Colorado-based Focus on the Family. “I want to be God’s man in Washington,”34 he said. He ran on a far-right platform and opposed exceptions to any abortion ban that would allow abortions for victims of rape or incest, saying, “We’re killing the wrong person in that case.”35 During his unsuccessful campaign, Duncan Bremer held up his brother’s role in Iraq as evidence of his own foreign policy experience, saying he had visited Iraq while Paul Bremer was heading the occupation. Duncan Bremer declared during his campaign, “While I prefer that the Islamic Jihadists convert to my world view and receive the benefits of it, my point is that they must give up their world view and their particular version of Islam in order for us to have a peaceful world. From a geopolitical point of view, it does not matter whether they convert to ‘peaceful Islam’ if that be a religion, or Buddhism or whatever, as long as they give up their religious ideology.”36 Paul Bremer’s wife, Francie, whom Dobson called a “prayer warrior,”37 told a Christian publication that “her husband viewed his work in Iraq as a chance to bring the light of freedom to the people of Iraq after decades of darkness there.”38
But Bremer’s zealotry was not confined to his religion. Upon his arrival, he moved swiftly to begin building the neoconservative vision in Iraq, ushering in a period that Naomi Klein labeled “Baghdad Year Zero.” True to form, after just two weeks in the country, Bremer declared that Iraq was “open for business.”39 The centerpiece of his plan was the rapid privatization of Iraq’s oil industry. Klein, who traveled to Iraq during Bremer’s tenure in the country and has written extensively on his rule, described the effects of his edict-based governance as such:
[Bremer] enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein’s economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.
If these policies sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market.40
Shortly after Bremer took over in Baghdad, economist Jeff Madrick wrote in the New York Times: “[B]y almost any mainstream economist’s standard, the plan, already approved by L. Paul Bremer III, the American in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is extreme—in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq’s economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor. . . . The Iraqi planners, apparently including the Bush administration, seem to assume they can simply wipe the slate clean.” Madrick stated boldly that Bremer’s plan “would allow a handful of foreign banks to take over the domestic banking system.”41
It seems appropriate, then, that Bremer, the senior U.S. official in Iraq, the public face of the occupation, would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but rather by a private mercenary company—and one founded by a right-wing Christian who had poured tens of thousands of dollars into Republican campaign coffers.
By mid-August, three months after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, resistance attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqi “collaborators” were a daily occurrence. “We believe we have a significant terrorist threat in the country, which is new,” Bremer said on August 12. “We take this very seriously.”42 As with other violent incidents and situations in preceding years, the chaos in Iraq would convert to financial success for Blackwater. On August 28, 2003, Blackwater was awarded the official “sole source,” no-bid $27.7 million contract to provide the personal security detail and two helicopters for Bremer43 as he carried out the all-important work of building the neoconservative program in Iraq. “Nobody had really figured out exactly how they were going to get him from D.C. and stand him up in Iraq,” recalled Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “The Secret Service went over and did an assessment and said, ‘You know what? It’s much, much more dangerous than any of us believed.’ So they came back to us.”44 Blackwater’s presence, Bremer wrote, “heightened the sense that Iraq had become even more dangerous.”45 The man who would head Bremer’s Blackwater security team was Frank Gallagher, who served as head of Henry Kissinger’s personal security detail in the 1990s when Bremer worked for Kissinger.46 “I knew and liked Frank,” Bremer recalled. “I trusted him totally.”47
Employing Blackwater mercenaries as his personal guards was made possible by the very neoliberal policies Bremer had advocated for throughout his career and was now implementing in Iraq. It was a groundbreaking moment in the process that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney launched in the early 1990s when he hired Brown and Root “to explore outsourcing logistical activities.”48 It also represented a major shift away from the long-held doctrine that the “U.S. military does not turn over mission-critical functions to private contractors,” according to Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors. “And you don’t put contractors in positions where they need to carry weapons. . . . A private armed contractor now has the job of keeping Paul Bremer alive—it can’t get much more mission-critical than that.”49 The privatization of the Bremer detail marked an almost immediate watershed moment for mercenary firms.
“Standard wages for PSD (personal security detail) pros [in Iraq] were previously running about $300 a day,” Fortune magazine reported. “Once Blackwater started recruiting for its first big job, guarding Paul Bremer, the rate shot up to $600 a day.”50 Blackwater described its Bremer project as a “turnkey security package.”51 Company vice president Chris Taylor said the job “was no ordinary executive protection requirement; it really amounted to a hybrid personal security detail (PSD) solution that had yet to be used anywhere. In response, Blackwater developed an innovative combat PSD program to ensure Ambassador Bremer’s safety and that of any ambassador who followed.”52 The company provided him with thirty-six “personnel protection” specialists, two K-9 teams, and three MD-530 Boeing helicopters with pilots to
taxi him around the country.53 In October 2003, a Blackwater spokesman said the company had just seventy-eight employees in Iraq, a number that would soon explode.54 A month after winning the Bremer contract, Blackwater registered its new security division with the North Carolina Secretary of State.55 Blackwater Security Consulting LLC would specialize in “providing qualified and trained Protective Security Specialist[s] (PSS) to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for Diplomatic Security for the purpose of conducting protective security operations in Iraq.”56 The Bremer contract had officially elevated Blackwater to a status as a sort of Praetorian Guard in the war on terror—a designation that would open many doors in the world of private military contracting. It wouldn’t be long before Blackwater was awarded a massive contract with the State Department to provide security for many U.S. officials in Iraq, not just the Ambassador. Paul Bremer’s picture would soon grace the top banner on the new Blackwater Security division’s Web site, as would images of Blackwater’s mercenaries around Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.57
Blackwater’s men brought a singularly Yankee flair to the Bremer job and, by most accounts, embodied the ugly American persona to a tee. Its guards were chiseled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniforms with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the trademark bear claw in the cross-hairs, sleeves rolled up. Some of them looked like caricatures, real-life action figures, or professional wrestlers. Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the road or fired rounds at cars if they got in the way of a Blackwater convoy. “You see these pictures in the media of Blackwater guys loaded to the hilt with pistols and M-4s and their hand out grabbing the camera. There’s a reason for that,” said former Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart, who protected John Negroponte, Bremer’s successor in Iraq. “I don’t want my face on Al-Jazeera. Sorry.” 58
Helicopters with snipers would hover above some Blackwater transport missions, as a menacing warning to everyone below. “They made enemies everywhere,” recalled Col. Thomas X. Hammes, the U.S. military official put in charge of building a “new” Iraqi military after Bremer disbanded the old one.59 “I would ride around with Iraqis in beat up Iraqi trucks, they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated. [But] they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town.”60 Hammes said Blackwater’s high-profile conduct in guarding Bremer broke the “first rule” of fighting an insurgency: “You don’t make any more enemies.” 61 Hammes said, “They were actually getting our contract exactly as we asked them to and at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.”62 An intelligence officer in Iraq told Time magazine, “Those Blackwater guys . . . they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks.”63 Al Clark, one of the founders of Blackwater, helped develop the company’s training procedures. In the United States, Clark said, “we get upset about a fender-bender.” But, he said, “you’ve got to get over that in Baghdad. Your car can be a 3,000-pound weapon when you need it. Hit and run. Trust me. The police aren’t coming to your house because you left the scene of an accident.”64
An apparent deadly case of contractor impunity allegedly involving Blackwater guards took place in May 2004. The incident was thoroughly investigated and reported by Los Angeles Times correspondent T. Christian Miller. 65 The U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Robert J. Callahan, was finishing up his tour of duty and was making the rounds to say his good-byes to various journalists and media organizations around the Iraqi capital. “As was typical for State Department officials, Callahan relied on Blackwater for transport around Baghdad,” according to Miller. Returning from one media compound, Callahan’s “five-vehicle convoy turned onto a broad thorough-fare running through Baghdad’s Masbah neighborhood, an area of five-story office buildings and ground-level shops.” At the same time, according to Miller, a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi truck driver named Mohammed Nouri Hattab, who was moonlighting as a taxi driver, was transporting two passengers he had just picked up in his Opel. “Hattab looked up and saw Callahan’s five-car convoy speed out of a side street in front of him. He was slowing to a stop about fifty feet from the convoy when he heard a burst of gunfire ring out, he said. Bullets shot through the hood of his Opel, cut into his shoulder, and pierced the chest of nineteen-year-old Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri, who was in the backseat, killing him,” according to Miller. “There was no warning. It was a sudden attack,” said Hattab.
Miller reported that, on background, “one US official said that embassy officials had reviewed the shooting and determined that two Blackwater employees in the convoy that day had not followed proper procedures to warn Hattab to stay back; instead they opened fire prematurely.” The official said the two had been fired and sent home. As of this writing, they have not been prosecuted. Miller obtained hundreds of pages of incident reports involving private military contractors in Iraq. He reported, “About 11 percent of the nearly two hundred reports involved contractors firing toward civilian vehicles. In most cases the contractors received no fire from the Iraqi cars.”66
Blackwater’s style fit in perfectly with Bremer’s mission in Iraq. In fact, one could argue that Bremer didn’t just get protection from Blackwater’s highly trained mercenaries but also from the all-powerful realities of the free-market lab he was running in Iraq. Indeed, it seems that those forces were what Bremer banked on to survive the Iraq job—if he died, Blackwater’s reputation would be shot. “If Blackwater loses a principal (like Bremer), they’re out of business, aren’t they?” asked Colonel Hammes. “Can you imagine being Blackwater, trying to sell your next contract, saying, ‘Well, we did pretty well in Iraq for about four months, and then he got killed.’ And you’re the CEO who’s going to hire and protect your guys. You’ll say, ‘I think I’ll find somebody else.’ . . . The problem for Blackwater [is] if the primary gets killed, what happens to Blackwater is they’re out of business. For the military, if the primary gets killed, that’s a very bad thing. There will be after-action reviews, etc., but nobody’s going out of business.”67
For Blackwater, keeping Paul Bremer alive would provide the company with an incredible marketing campaign: If we can protect the most hated man in Iraq, we can protect anyone, anywhere. Indeed, in less than a year Osama bin Laden would release an audio tape offering a reward for Bremer’s killing. “You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill mujahedeen [holy warriors],” bin Laden declared in May 2004. “We in the Al Qaeda organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq.”68 The resistance, too, reportedly offered a $50,000 reward for the killing of any Blackwater guards.69 “We had prices on our heads over there,” recalled ex-Blackwater contractor Capeheart. “We all knew it.”70
Bremer said that soon after Blackwater took over his security, “at Rumsfeld’s request, the U.S. Secret Service had done a survey of my security and had concluded that I was the most threatened American official anywhere in the world. . . . One report Blackwater took seriously suggested that one of the Iraqi barbers in the palace had been hired to kill me when I got a haircut.” After that, Blackwater moved Bremer into a villa on the palace grounds that reportedly had housed Qusay Hussein’s mother-in-law.71
In December 2003, a few months after Blackwater began guarding Bremer, came the first publicly acknowledged resistance attack on the proconsul. It happened the night of December 6, right after Bremer saw Defense Secretary Rumsfeld off at the Baghdad airport. “It was after 11:00 p.m. when [Bremer’s aide] Brian McCormack and I got into my armored SUV for the run back to the Green Zone,” Bremer recalled. “Our convoy, as usual, consis
ted of two ‘up-armored’ Humvees sheathed in tan slabs of hardened steel, a lead-armored Suburban, our Suburban, another armored Suburban following, and two more Humvees. Overhead, we had a pair of buzzing Bell helicopters with two Blackwater snipers in each.”72 Inside the SUV, Bremer and McCormack were discussing whether Bremer should attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bremer was thinking that he “could now use some of the ski resort pampering” when a “deafening” explosion happened, followed by automatic gunfire. The lead vehicle in the convoy had its tire blown out by an improvised explosive device (IED), and resistance fighters were attacking with AK-47s. According to Bremer, a bullet had hit a side window in his SUV. “We’d been ambushed, a highly organized, skillfully executed assassination attempt,” wrote Bremer. “I swung around and looked back. The Suburban’s armored-glass rear window had been blown out by the IED. And now AK rounds were whipping through the open rectangle.” As he sped toward the safety of the palace, Bremer recalled that “with the stench of explosives lingering in the car, I considered. Davos, all those good meals. . . . Francie could fly over and we could ski. That was about as far from Baghdad’s Airport Road and IEDs as you could get.”73
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