Soldiers of Fortune Bearing Sword and Pen

A little while back, one particular episode of Law and Order piqued my interest and not because of any legal or criminal issues. In a nutshell: a man is murdered in a hotel room. It turns out, the victim is a "military contractor" although I still use the correct term, mercenary. The speedy and efficient detectives soon find out that the killer is a fellow mercenary whose motive is revenge. He blames the victim for a risky mission that resulted in his friends being killed in Iraq. Here is the bit that got me in a dither: to add the sympathy effect to the killer, the reason he was in Iraq was because he needed to help pay his ailing father's medical bills. That is, the poor guy needed to make some extra money.

Let's put this in perspective. Imagine you're an Iraqi juggling putting food on the table and not getting killed. Your country is a mess. Every day is an ordeal, you live in a volatile environment where many different conflicts (geopolitical/colonial/regional/ethnic/religious) are playing out. Being Muslim (Sunni or Shi'ite), Arab, Kurd, talking to an American, approaching a checkpoint, driving too near a US military vehicle, breathing etc., can get you killed. Or simply, you could fall prey (kidnapped for ransom, robbed) to marauding criminals (possibly the only element that has been liberated). You may even have a family member in custody, enduring who knows what. Gasoline (of all things) is scarce, electricity sporadic, medical care pitiful and the future looks, at best, like more of the same and could very likely get worse, considering the ever-present threat of civil war. Your country, the cradle of civilization, with a rich history that goes back thousands (not hundreds) of years is under foreign occupation. Who are the occupiers? Nations that have no business being there other than their own self-interest. If you try to resist, you may find yourself fighting a mercenary.

In other words, there is someone in your country willing to kill you or arrest and torture you, who comes from a nation thousands of miles away, speaks another language, is totally unaware of or indifferent to your culture and to whom you have done no harm. Other than having the audacity to resist the will of his employers.

Why would he kill you? Did you do anything to harm him or his family? Did you take any of his property? Simply, this is his profession. Or, he may need to pay his father's medical bills. Or, he may just need some extra cash. Either way, killing some Ay-rab in the desert or some raghead in Afghanistan is a job. Nothing personal.

Mercenaries don't just carry machine guns, some fire off deadly editorials or "news." People like Judith Miller come to mind. She may want us to believe that she was on the leading edge of a Pulitzer Prize winning story, but I believe she was just hoping to cash in. Even if they had found a tiny fraction of the WMDs she was blathering about, she would still be seen as the "intrepid and connected reporter" with all the inside info and who broke the news. Oh, the books to be sold, the magazine covers to grace, the "behind the scenes" TV specials. As to the war she helped justify and the needless death and destruction that followed not to mention the elusiveness of those pesky WMDs, no matter. Anyway, the "world is much better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone." Nothing personal.

There were many other such media mercenaries who gladly jumped on the bandwagon to make money. They churned out reams of drivel about WMD stockpiles waiting to be loaded on aerial drones bound to poison our little leaguers, when if they had asked anyone in aviation, they would have found out this would be beyond Iraq's technical capabilities. The talking head "experts" with their smarmy (paid) smiles polluted our TVs, pleading with us to let them bomb the Iraqis who, according to their sources, like the slimy self-promoter Chalabi, were waiting to shower us with baklawa and rose petals. Raspy, outrageous talk show hosts pulled in great ratings by screaming "revenge for 9/11" and "Saddam is the new Hitler," whipping up the ire of the ignorant, useful idiots who eagerly gulped their lies.

Now that their complicity is exposed (only to those who have bothered to open one eye), they continue to cash their meal tickets by telling us how things are turning around. "Just you wait, things will get better, after the capture of Saddam Hussein…er… after the handover…er…after the constitution…er…after the election (purple fingers everywhere)…etc. etc. etc. Keep the gravy train chugging along, let's start on Iran. Even Canadian media chipped in by supplying a bogus story about colour coded ribbons for non-Muslims. The newspaper subsequently retracted the report, but not before talk show hosts eagerly jumped on the story. Talk about creating work.

These examples are not cases of reporters being duped. Any reporter worth his press card and fedora would have checked sources and facts and whatever else they supposedly learned in journalism school when not partying. Instead, they couldn't be bothered to earn their pay by doing their jobs and we have this for reporting:

The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!

~ Stephen Colbert (White House Correspondents Dinner Speech, 2006)

Bless you Stephen Colbert for your pithy insight. I wish I could have come up with that.

Continuing their shameless mendacity, they are now happily earning their pay by assuring the red-staters how things are really going well there and if only the "liberal" news media would tell that story. Rest assured, if there was even a shred of real progress in Iraq, we would never hear the end of it. It would make the Michael Jackson trial or bird flu look like slow news days.

Meanwhile, Iraqis continue to suffer while some people continents away milk the cash cow.

Even the lure of big bucks would not be enough for me to offer up propaganda or fire a shot in anger at some unknown human being halfway across the world who has done no harm to my country. But that's just me.

I wonder if, years from now in their old age, during their quiet moments, staring at a mirror will they say, "I did good on Iraq."

May 27, 2006