Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated],   ISBN:9781568583945

Customer Rating: 

The only reason one can call this a book is for the format of it. This is a patchwork of quotes from newspapers, interviews and TV talks. I did not expect a book written by a young a journalist to be of much valor, but I expected to be nonbiased. It is not. From the first half page of the book I determined that the author treats the war on terror and Blackwater in a negative way. The copied and pasted quotes are not commented or interpreted. At some point the author tries to make some historical connections between past Iraqi events and actual dealings. Very poor attempt. This to me was a book written by a tree-huger, latte drinker, bottle recycler newyorker.

It took me a while to get used with the style of writing. The first almost one hundred pages were a hassle. One can continually read about the war in Iraq and happenings that seem isolated from the whole war. Blackwater is portrayed as the bad guy all along. Anything that the author could muster and was able to turn into a negative view was written to highlight the evil. As far as I could determine, Blackwater is a business that does whatever other businesses do to turn a profit. If Erik Prince gives money to the Republican Party, good for him. Giving money to parties is a free choice and the amounts constitute public record. If the Republican Party favors him, very nice for them: friends should help each other. Everyone has a reason to support a party and s/he does so in order to benefit of tax reductions or better life. However, if there is corruption and Blackwater gets contracts preferentially, than the parties should be brought under the law and justice should be served.

What bothered me a lot was the fact that US military and Blackwater are portrayed as criminals against Iraqi while 9/11 is only mentioned as a point of reference in time. At one point, during the battle of Fallujah in April 2004, the author quotes a doctor that says "there is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans have done to innocent people", while seeing the amounts of Iraqi dead at the US military attacks. Let me remind the Iraqi Sunni that during Saddam's regime, Shiite population was killed, including women and children. The same happened during the Iraq - Iran war, when Iraqis were killing Iranians, including women and children. The same happened during 9/11, when thousands of innocent people were killed, thousands of families were destroyed, and God knows how many kids are growing up having parents killed in the tragedy. I guess, when someone else is terrorized, it's not a problem. The tragedy hits when we are the ones under the bullets. In a poll I read a few years back, only 5% of Iraqis condemned the attacks on 9/11.

To anyone that read and understood history, the human species is inclined not to peace, but war. The fact that we are living peaceful times in the US is a blessing and a miracle. But the norm is war. It has been through History and will continue that way. Arab population will always hate everyone who is not Muslim. That will never change. Christians had their going when killing Muslims, other Christians, Native Americans or Maya's. Having written a book on how armies are bad and mercs are worst is the most unrealistic project.

There are chapters in the book that don't have much to do with Blackwater. The Blackwater name is thrown around just so one might decide this company is connected with everybody and everything. Things as Blackwater mercs are first in saving Katrina's affected people are presented as bad news. Well, if I am in trouble, I don't really care who saves me: could be the National Guard, could be Blackwater, or could be my neighbor! Thank you for getting there in time for me to be saved from the calamity!

All in all, this book is a jock. It is unrealistic, unpatriotic and disrespectful to the people that died and their families, so we can have a very comfortable life, debating about peace and a green world.

I am still to find a book on Blackwater so I can understand who, what, when, why and how much about this company. Everyone has its time and now this is the Blackwater time.

Customer Rating: 

Is it appropriate for the United States to turned the wars we fight into a for-profit business for private corporations that aren't accountable? That's the central thesis (I think...) of this interesting but somewhat inadequately-structured book focusing on one of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend.

Jeremy Scahill has done his best to penetrate the veil of secrecy that surrounds Blackwater and its operations, and has probably done as good a job as anyone could in the circumstances. But he's better at the small-scale stuff (the story of how a bunch of Chilean Blackwater recruits ended up fighting an American war in Iraq, for instance) than he is at the big-picture context, and that's what ended up making this a disappointing read for me. I learned a lot about Blackwater and its founder, Erik Prince, and in particular the latter's ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist agenda. But, after years of reading books by the likes of Thomas Franks, or James Mann's excellent "The Rise of the Vulcans" (much less Rajiv Chandrasekaran's wonderful Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage), much of this has already been discussed, repeatedly, and by the time this book appeared was fairly clear to most of Scahill's potential readers.

I came to this book looking for more. I'm familiar with foreign policy issues, but my knowledge of military policy lags far behind. I had hoped -- I think, reasonably -- to find in a book about Blackwater some insight into how and why the government allowed the conventional military forces to slide into such a state (size, lack of training, etc.) that using Blackwater's resources and ultimately its mercenaries became the only option. Scahill does a very solid job recounting the "what happened", but the reasons why it happened are almost glaringly absent. Were these budgetary constraints? A lack of strategic planning in the post-Cold War era? Complacency? It does seem clear from Scahill's description that there was a large gap between the skills and resources needed to fight the war in Iraq and what the United States military ended up having available. But why? And if so, why didn't the DOD address that? (I can guess why, but I'd rather have had that discussion aired in the book.)

The state of affairs that Scahill recounts didn't appear overnight, or in a vacuum. And yet this is presented to the reader as simply the facts of the matter. So the book is an interesting chronicle, but lacks the foundations I think is necessary to make his broader point -- that Blackwater's growing dominance and power threatens American ideals and even its institutions.

I also found puzzling some stylistic and other structural issues. We hear several times in a handful of pages that Prince's first wife was dying or died of cancer, often when it wasn't necessary to understand the context. Scahill introduces Greystone in the earliest pages as a proactive engagement team, seeming to raise the prospect of Blackwater becoming a global and offensive force rather than one that is a de facto part of a U.S. military defense. That point seems to be central to Scahill's argument about the dangers that Blackwater poses to the US, and yet we don't hear anything more about Greystone until the final pages, when its warmer and fuzzier image is discussed. These are just a few examples of places where I found the book bumpy -- it raised questions that ultimately went unanswered. For instance, I'm still not clear on whether Blackwater delivers lower-cost services as Prince had promised -- the information on that is scattered and hard to follow, or whether they are driving costs up. Again, I assume the latter, but...

Ultimately, it's hard to understand whether Scahill set out to write a book about the Iraq war from the standpoint of 'private contractors' or to examine the significance of the outsourcing of war to for-profit businesses. The book jumps back and forth between the two themes, and given the complexity of the subject matter, ends up doing justice to neither.

One final note, purely about style. Scahill is a footnote junkie, presumably because he knew his book would be scoured by critics looking for some sourcing flaw on which they could hang either a viable critique or even a libel lawsuit. But when I see the number of footnotes creep over 100 in a reasonable number of chapters in a non-scholarly book, and realize that a lot of them pertain to facts that really aren't open to question (such as the date Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad and the fact that he moved into a former palace of Saddam Hussein), I begin to roll my eyes. Also irritating to me as a reader hoping for a smoothly-flowing narrative were the long chunks of newspaper or magazine articles quoted directly when Scahill could have summarized the salient points in a few sentences -- buildings facing a Fallujah school were riddled with bullet holes, but there was no sign that the school occupied by American forces had been under attack, or that the Americans had aimed their fire at rooftop snipers, X in Y newspaper reported. Instead, we get 2/3 of a page of the article about an incident that Blackwater itself wasn't even involved in. When that happens over and over again, it simply draws attention to the fact that this is a book that -- necessarily -- is based on second-hand sources.

This is a book that I'm glad I borrowed to read. Unless you're an avid military historian, I'd suggest you do the same. Ultimately, this was an adequate chronicle of events in Iraq (there are far better ones out there...) and an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying look at Blackwater's rise to wealth and infamy against the backdrop of that. But rather than satisfying my curiosity, I found that it simply whetted it. I'll be on the lookout for another book on the subject; those to whom this will appeal will likely be those who already share Scahill's broad views and are looking for some facts to support them. I tend to be alarmed by the same things that concern Scahill, but I wanted more from this book.

Customer Rating: 

Blackwater: the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy Scahill, is an eye-opening look into the exponential new market of private contractors. It explores, in incredible detail, nearly everything you ever wanted to know about Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and a lot more. Scahill's style of writing is both engaging and informative. He writes with a clear bias against Blackwater, but he counters his own strong opinions by bringing up others' points of view. Though much of Blackwater's business actions are secret, Scahill has accomplished an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism and backs up his main ideas and small ideas with full and comprehensive evidence. Blackwater offers an in-depth look into the world of private armies and what it means, now and in the future, for America and the world abroad.

Blackwater is superbly written. Scahill is an extremely talented writer and, for the most part, makes it hard to put the book down. He first presents a major event surrounding Blackwater, like the Fallujah killings. Then, he delves into the backend workings of what caused that event and why it is significant. Scahill writes in an engaging and exciting way, but many times he bores on all the minutest details. At some points in the book, one feels that they cannot put the book down, while at other points one feels they are just reading words and not processing the information. The book is an amazing resource for scholars and those who want to know every little thing there is to know about Blackwater, but is not for (Scahill's main audience) the masses. Scahill would come out a lot stronger if he just focused on his main ideas and trimmed the book about two-hundred-and-fifty pages. His research is very important and all Americans should be able to be presented to it in a succinct and entertaining way. A very good (and popular) documentary could and should be produced on Scahill's findings.

Scahill does not tie his main ideas together well. He disperses the same ideas and evidence throughout the book in rather arbitrary places, offering lots of same evidence that proving the same points. This gets quite irksome and annoying. Not only that, he quotes people saying the same thing over and over again. His book includes great material, but needs to be much better organized.

Scahill's main points, however, are very important and he does get them across. He exposes Erik Prince and the head people at Blackwater as extreme rightwing Christians with neoconservative agendas. He explains how Blackwater's soldiers are free from all punishment and can be an excellent way for a country to indirectly do dirty work without "red tape" and load of negative media attention. Scahill also warns of how powerful Blackwater is becoming and what it means when a private army can "single-handedly take down many of the world's governments" (Page 343). He explains how the head people at Blackwater are cozy with influential Republicans and other law makers and depicts Blackwater as a greedy company that's overcharging the government for their "cut-the-corner" services. Many of Blackwater's business doings are shady and secret, but Scahill comes up with the extensive evidence to make you see his point of view.

Blackwater is a very important book and should be adapted into a shorter paperback or a documentary. Scahill writes with a certain intensity and passion that makes you want to keep on turning the page, but all too often he simply runs you down with details. This book is highly recommended to any academic or researcher interested in Blackwater and other private mercenaries. Scahill does a good job of communicating his main ideas, but his support is scrambled throughout the book. His view is one-sided, but he also tells Blackwater's version of the story. People only interested in the nuts and bolts of Blackwater and other private mercenaries would be better off watching a documentary or reading a shorter book.

Customer Rating: 

Wow! What an eye opener this was. Fascinating read. It should be on everyones "must read" list.

Customer Rating: 

This is a hard book to read. It's long and the print is small. Still, read it anyway, even if you read it between other books. It has some eye opening info and exposes some dangerous issues. I had a friend in Blakwater who was killed in Iraq. He never denied the New Word Order but would never talk about it. Read this book...