Comments on: American weirdness

By: ed

ed — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 03:31:00 +0000

So if they’d been hired to guard Baghdad Museum they’d have still been mercenaries would they? Do you claim to know precisely what they were in Iraq for? If they were ‘mercenaries’ how come they didn’t come in their armour-plated car and go down with all weapons blazing? ‘Mercenaries’, in the sense of, say, the lot that went into Sierra Leone, or the lot that were trying to assist the opposition to Mugabe, are a different species I would argue. What, in your view, is the difference between a ‘security guard’ and a mercenary? Bear in mind that much of Iraq is peaceful and violence an occasional interruption. Many of their fellow workers may be looking after compounds in relatively peaceful locations- what are they, ‘mercenaries’ or ‘security personnel’? They’re not fighting, they’re filling in the gaps left after the fighting, as far as I can see. These ones just happened to get caught in a flare up in a volatile area.

By: john b

john b — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 11:44:00 +0000

Hmm. They were private security personnel working in a war zone. "Security" is the key here: the chefs and telecoms engineers are not mercenaries.

They didn't deserve to die (and to be honest, I think mercenaries in general get a bad press: after all, a lot of people from poor backgrounds join the army to get training/a decent wage/US citizenship, rather than out of honour or love for their countrymen), but they were non-enlisted personnel carrying out a military task in a war zone. That fits at least some definitions of "mercenary", including mine.

By: Bob Bunnett

Bob Bunnett — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 09:37:00 +0000

Hi John,

I sailed into your blog via your comments on Tim Blair's site.

You have accepted a convenient self-serving lie by labelling these four Americans "mercenaries". They were not mercenaries. They were American nationals employed to provide security for food shipments as part of a contracted-out American catering operation.

A bloke I know is employed by the CPA to help develop Iraq's telecommunications infrastructure. I guess that makes him a "mercenary", too.

Hanging the label "mercenary" on these men is deeply unfair. I don't expect you to feel profound sorrow at their deaths - I don't either because I didn't know them. But a little common decency requires us not to make up lies about their character and motivations to try to fit them into our preferred script and "justify" what happened to them.