Question: Compare the language of cause, analysis, description, and solution to evil in Augustine, Nietzsche, Schüssler-Fiorenza and one author of your choice (Buber). Identify juxtapositions, similarities, opposition, etc., amongst the authors, and situate your own view.

The text of Augustine’s Confessions constructs an aesthetic metaphysics from within a post-Manichaean narrative of his intellectual and spiritual autobiography. Augustine modified (from Plotinus) the aesthetic idea of “plenitude,” in which the best creation is the creation that allows every possible kind of existence. For Augustine this implies a vertically-scaled hierarchy that I think of in terms of a ladder. God is both outside and at the top of this ladder, and God’s perfection of being and goodness stands as the immutable authority of measurement. Goodness is equated with being (or existence), since both go hand in hand up and down this ladder of the cosmic hierarchy. The gap between the separated top of the ladder and the rest describes the initial difference between God and God’s creation. Since Augustine believes that God created everything out of nothing (ex nihilo), the parts of creation “neither altogether are, not altogether are not, for they are, since they are from Thee, but are not, because they are not what Thou are. For that truly is which remains unchangeably” (VII, 17). As created, humans do not participate in God’s being.

In order to argue against the idea of evil as a positive force or substance in opposition to the good, the order of goods and the order of being for Augustine are in terms of proper measure at each level of the hierarchy. Augustine employs the language of “privation” and “corruption” to describe both the proper tincture of being and non-being and the order of goods proper to the perspective of each level. “Privation” is a “taking away” (privatio), a lack, an absence, a loss – especially of something necessary to the functioning or flourishing of life. To Augustine, evil is “nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be” (III, 12). This conflation of being and goodness allows him to describe a dynamic at each point of the ladder, in which the initial proper measurement is, again properly, sucked away. The violence of death, or even of privation as an act of depriving one in want or distress is not addressed in terms of any detraction from God’s perfection. Augustine’s interpretation of the Genesis narrative also authorizes him to place women in a state of greater “privation” than men (XIII, 47). However, privation is an optimistic term in the sense that it implies a sense of not-yet-realized potential and the possibility of replenishment. Since humans are twice-removed from God’s perfection, by creation and by the “fall,” our degree of goodness and existence has to do with staying on the proper rung and looking upwards. There is good on every level, but the measure of our loves should be in proportion and in priority to our God-given position. Sin is committed through an “immoderate inclination towards those goods of the lowest order” in which “the better and higher are forsaken” (II, 10). When we love in the wrong order, we are indirectly punished by God: “For Thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should be its own punishment” (I, 19).

“Corruption” carries more negativity, suggesting the broken pieces of something that was whole. Only things that are mutable can be corrupted, and insofar as things of creation are in a state of “privation” of God’s perfect immutability of goodness and being, creation is corrupted by its mixture with non-being (voidness) as lack of goodness. Evil is not a substance, because a substance can be only insofar as it is good. In so far as a thing is corruptible, it is good, or else there would be nothing to corrupt (VII, 18). This suggests that humans need some form of metaphysical rust-proofing. But there is another sense in which “corruption” pertains, and for that Augustine has to rely on the Adamic “fall.” In this sense, evil consists in the self-originating act of pride of turning away from the highest good. Against the original turning away (down) from God in the context of free will, Augustine posits a genetic-spiritual transmission (literally, for Augustine, via the semen), in which we inherit this tendency. As a kind of contagion or infection, sinful pride (a misdirection of the will) is parasitic in a more thoroughgoing way than oxidation and the like might indicate.

The terms privation and corruption both place the blame for certain kinds of suffering on human will. Each individual has an inherited tendency and a free choice to will the inappropriate thing, thereby placing him or her in the “bondage” of sin. The solution to evil for Augustine is to turn to God for grace and salvation, to love God more than your own private good. In privation, turn to God for replenishment. In corruption, let God clean you and loose you from your chains. It is by the grace of God that the will is liberated from its servitude to sin. The only alternative to that choice is this: to the extent that we bring excessive non-being upon ourselves, we are subject to punishment (both at the time and in the life thereafter). While Augustine relies on an optimistic language, he requires the idea of hell to balance the results of human free-will against the totalizing economy of creation.

Nietzsche is not a Christian and offers no god’s-eye view since for him there is no absolute objective structure of the world existing independently of human apprehension. While Augustine can rely on a sense of extra-human authority, Nietzsche maintains that we construct value and meanings from particular perspectives and through our own actions. His analysis aims to be historically and linguistically genealogical, asking how ideas about morality have arisen. He describes evil primarily in terms of strength and weakness, or master and slave moralities (with frequent, somewhat Darwinian allusions to differences of function in the animal world). Although theses terms appear oppositional, Nietzsche stresses that they are more often expressed in terms of gradation and interpenetration, both in communities and in the same human being (Beyond Good & Evil, sec. 260).

Genealogically speaking, “evil” has been framed in terms of power that is sought by both the weak and the strong, but only exercised by the strong. Moral designations are first of all applied to human beings. The difference between good and evil – or good and bad – depends on one’s position. A master morality depicts itself as “noble” and therefore good in that it experiences the construction of its own values. Against its “triumphant affirmation” of itself in action (power and will), it sees weakness (flattery, humbleness, liars, doglike people who allow themselves to be mistreated) as “contemptible” (“bad” rather than evil). The “noble” has power in self-relation, has no need of pity, and honors others over a long run with gratitude or revenge (BGE, sec. 260). Ressentiment (resentment) arises from the slave morality, where slaves depict themselves as morally good, but dominated by evil masters who rule by fear. Their morality depends on a hostile external world against which they react with blame and a sometimes hidden imaginary of revenge (see On the Genealogy of Morals, first essay).

The conventionally Christian idea of “evil” for Nietzsche represents a slave morality since it is based on the fear of the power of others—a façade whereby the weak make of their weakness a moral strength and spread mediocrity while waiting for their revenge when their kingdom comes. Nietzsche’s criticism is more generally aimed at the illusion of absolutes, which for him inevitably revert to their opposites; what is framed as “immoral” is what happens. Christianity’s “morality” in no way increases actual sensitivity to others, but rather impoverishes instincts and drives. His assertion of “the death of God,” is not only an announcement of the end of metaphysics or of the effective function of the absolute. As Baudrillard reads Nietzsche (and I agree with its tenor), Nietzsche’s announcement also acts as a provocation and a challenge to God (or human ideas about God) to exist against the Christian image of God (supposing that there was only one such image).

The solution is a dismissal of the conventions of absolute terms, and a “transvaluation of values,” where the superhuman (Übermensch, which also includes the action of the subhuman “blond beast” or bird of prey) exercises willful power in a complex state of delight and love of fate—an individual Dionysian affirmation of the sovereignty of the self in the world. In sum, Nietzsche claims that we need to liberate ourselves from all conceptions of “morality” in order to be free to experience the constructions of our own sense of what morality might be outside the regulatory framings of power relationships.

Buber’s Images of Good and Evil (published as the second part of Good and Evil) performs a phenomenology of structures of consciousness through readings of the Hebrew-biblical and Zoroastrian myths. Each account represents a different kind and stage of evil for human consciousness. He interprets both narratives, finally, in terms of differences in the language of decision, and although both kinds of evil are represented in each, he focuses on the Persian (Iranian) battle of the warring gods to describe the structure of evil as the decision to do wrong instead of right, to be false instead of true.

Here I shall focus on his readings of the Hebraic bible accounts, which suggest that the soul has an urge that is “evil,” which is passion, and an urge that is “good,” which is directionality. Buber recasts evil as the sundering of these urges. Evil, or sin, is the “way” which fills the earth with violence as a result of a passionate, but directionless products of the “imaginary”(GE, 91). To Buber, every imagined possibility entices the soul. The demonic danger that “lies in wait” when passion and direction are sundered is the “tension of omnipossibility” that exists as a result of the “vortex of indecision” of one’s soul.

Buber’s “demythologizing” interpretations of the biblical accounts are noteworthy in that he avoids the problems of Augustine’s fall-before-the-fall and condemnation of sexual desire. Passion and direction together are “very good.” His solution is not to extirpate the evil urge passion, but to reunite it with the good urge direction: to “yoke” the urges of evil and good back together in the service of God. This will “equip the absolute potency of passion with the one direction that renders it capable of great love and of great service” (GE, 92-97). He suggests a personal phenomenology in which you would meditate in a complete way upon an occurrence in which you seriously acknowledge, for yourself and not as a result of societal taboos, that you were bound up in the actuality of evil, either through decision or indecision. He suggests that when you really remember what it was like, you will see that in the “vortex” of possibilities were not “things,” but “possible ways of joining and overcoming them” (GE, 126). When the soul affirms the one direction in relation to which the soul is crystallized, it affirms its best in relation to God. Only the good of yoked passion and direction can be done from the position of this self-affirmation of decision. For each, this good is different, because we are all called differently by God.

Schüssler-Fiorenza does not describe evil, not even by a performance of its differences from conventional uses: the term itself disappears from the discourse. I see this absence functioning in different ways. It signals a refusal to re-invoke all conventional associations (especially as other, scapegoat, alien) on anything other than feminist terms. In this way, it also functions as an acceleration of the essential non-evil to which each of the other thinkers have subscribed.

In her biblical interpretations, Schüssler-Fiorenza theorizes (and practices) a feminist hermeneutics of evaluation in response to patriarchal structures of oppression, and a feminist hermeneutics of liberation that affirms the bodies and voices of women. There is an implicit language of description of evil in the former, and a language of solution in the latter. Androcentric language, phallogocentric representations of ultimate reality and authority, racism, colonial exploitation, sterotyping, and the like are all evaluated negatively in the context of a vision of freedom for women. The ultimate “litmus test” for invoking Scripture with authority “must be whether or not biblical texts and traditions seek to end relations of domination and exploitation” (BNS, xiii). Her writing is social, political, and pragmatic.

Her book Bread not stone: The challenge of feminist biblical interpretation describes a re-naming of God, church, scripture, and language. The structures of oppression and dehumanization that patriarchy has constructed in the metaphor of permanent “tablets of stone” is transformed to the image of bread that “nourishes, sustains, and energizes” women (there may be an implicit anti-Semitism in this transformation, but her point is the change in functional metaphor). Likewise, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation argues – through the words of the “resident alien,” expressed in the figure of the Syro-Phoenician woman who interrupts Jesus’ retreat to argue for her daughter – for the disruptive and “incendiary power” of the Word to transform discourses of “objectivist scientific or ecclesial doctrinal ethos into a critical rhetoric.” Her hermeneutic center is the notion of the ekklesia, taking from the ancient legislative assembly of citizens “called out” by the crier “the practice and vision of a discipleship of equals as the women-church”. The women-church collectively describes the men and women who struggle for liberation from patriarchal oppression and who are affected by biblical discourses.

Her critical theology of liberation attempts to take responsibility for discourses in the recognition that “all language about the divine is incommensurate with divine reality” (BSS, 6) and that interpretation is historical and framed by varying imperatives and conditions. She focuses on a metaphorical space between the “logic of patriarchy” and the “logic of democracy” where emancipatory practices of interpretation might be engendered in biblical interpretation, by exploring not only what the text excludes, but also how the text constructs what it does include by tracing the “rhetorical moves, spaces, silences and crevices” of these two logics. Schüssler-Fiorenza’s constructions of affirmative possibility against kyriocentric (master-centered) readings of Scripture are already a practice of the solution that she describes.

Against all of the above thinkers, one could claim—and this would be my own tendency—that there is evil, and that evil and goodness exist in a very interdependent and interpenetrating relationship. A modified Manichean position such as this would be perspectival without complete relativism, where each temporary resting-place of constructed identity defines its own evils (usually in the process either of creating or being assaulted by them – or witnessing either). With Schüssler-Fiorenza, I would agree that evil and goodness can only be framed in terms of problematic subject-positions and institutional or communal conditions. A metaphysics such as Augustine’s is not possible. Efforts to imagine what a God’s-eye position would look like (such as Borges’ “The Aleph” or “The Library of Babel”) are interesting simply through the vertigo they induce. The God perspective, whatever that might mean, is not human nor does it translate easily to the human niche in the cosmos.

I think that there can be a will toward evil (in everyone to a greater or lesser extent at different times) in a predatory human agency that takes active delight in the observation and infliction of the suffering and pain of others. There can also be evil where there is not a specific will to evil or malicious enjoyment taken in the suffering of others, but where there is profound misunderstanding of the effects of what they do – particularly with the person who in a position to give aid and succor or at least kindess and compassion and refuses to do so. More generally, there is an ongoing dynamic of permeations of violence in active, passive, and complicit forms (with greater and lesser degrees of defensive rationalization or acceptance of responsibility for them). Any attempt to place them in a stable hierarchy has to fail, since space, place, temporality, and form are in states of reversals and metamorphosis.

Although I confine myself to notions of humanly-constructed (human, all too human) evils and systems of evil when theorizing, I am also fascinated by representations of inhuman evils in the American popular imagination. In the late twentieth-century, Americans seem to require more and more images of evil. What might this signify?

Buber’s phenomenological readings, like all other readings, simply re-mythologize what they intend to demythologize, in more or less convincing ways, to different communities, classes, genders, and so on. My objection to Buber’s Images of Good and Evil is that he claims to have described universal stable structures of consciousness from specifically-located myths. He assumes their influence on himself and his communal structures, but he does not show how these influences operate, nor is he conscious of the narrativity of his narrative. Against Buber’s claim that the soul can only crystallize in one direction, I suggest that it is fairly difficult, if not impossible to find just one direction, although two or three are sometimes possible. In my own experience, an additional problem is that any such crystallization tends to provide some of the conditions for the next problem. In this, I partly agree with Nietzsche, and am also influenced by Baudrillard’s notion of the “fatal” strategies of the object.

Schüssler-Fiorenza’s sense of ethics in biblical scholarship runs the risk of a “slave morality” in Nietzsche’s sense. To counter this, new perspectives and strategies for speaking with power and authority are required that do not simply re-instantiate the same old problems. When liberation discourse becomes authoritative, something is lost – the core of liberation and freedom without which the discourse is meaningless. Power itself is a metamorphizing mixture of good and evil. For example, the powerful uncovering of patriarchal oppression through the incendiary word can generate effects that uncover certain truths, while in a Heideggarian sense also serve to cover over the power relations between women: to separate those who fight for liberation openly from those who not, to separate believers from unbelievers, to assert supremacy of one community over another while pretending not to do so, to control the use of language, to encourage conformity in the very valorization of the claim to embrace difference, and so on.

A search for causes for evil seems to me – ultimately – futile, since causes are everywhere and nowhere. Only evil effects can be named with confidence. In a way, Heideggarian “thrownness” and “dasein” are inflected in the American sayings “you had to be there” and “wherever you are, there you are.” This is not to say that one has to inhabit a particular subject-position in order to describe it, but it does suggest that a better description might result from listening to the people who are “there.” This suggests something like a hermeneutics of multiple attentiveness.

There are also multiple methods of analysis that can be constructed, and each construction tells a more or less convincing narrative for a different group of people. As part of the dissertation project, I intend to explore some of changes in literary representations of evil in twentieth-century America. My method of analysis will be a somewhat postmodern eclectic one in the sense that it will that picks up theories as a bricoleur, as they seem pragmatically useful in the process of religious readings of literary texts. I do not subscribe to one particular discipline in isolation, or even to one theory in exclusion to all others, but am by nature and inclination intellectually interdisciplinary (although yes, I am well aware that this may be destructive to my future flourishing. As Martin Luther did, I can only post the note on the great door and state, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”). I am suspicious of communal demands, but I welcome a deeper understanding of multiple social locations.

I have no idea what the solution to evil might look like, or if such a thing as a “solution” to evil is possible (I do most seriously doubt it).

How You Ended The War

Dear Ms. N: Thank you for contacting me regarding the National Security Agency’s (NSA) monitoring of conversations connected to terrorist activity and the treatment of military detainees. It is good to hear from you.

I certainly understand your concerns regarding personal freedoms. We are blessed to live in a free and effective democracy, and, just like you, I hold dear the personal freedoms that are provided to each and every law-abiding American.

As you know, the world changed on September 11, 2001. In the weeks following the catastrophic and murderous attacks on our nation, President Bush authorized the NSA to intercept certain international communications into and out of the United States from persons known to have links to terrorist organizations. As it has been publicly discussed, the purpose of the monitoring program is to prevent another attack on our country. This program is effective and the terrorist plots that have been foiled demonstrate that it is vitally important for the President of the United States to have the power and authority to act on information to protect the American people.

With respect to military detainees captured by the United States, they should be treated humanely and in a manner that honors our agreement under the Geneva Conventions. On October 17, 2006, President Bush signed into law (P.L. 109-366) a bill that outlines the treatment of our military detainees and our interrogation program. This law will further underscore to other countries that the United States will treat its detainees properly and justly.

As always, I appreciate hearing from you.

(Yada yada yada, I’m so sure he appreciates hearing from me.)

So here is my response. I am almost completely certain that such correspondence has no impact on Senator Chambliss whatsoever, but perhaps his staff draws some kind of statistical trend reports for purposes of future elections.

I’m not the only Georgian who wonders why Mr. Chambliss continues to puppet the lies of this administration.

Dear Senator Chambliss:

The NSA monitoring of conversations and email has gone beyond the bounds of what you describe in this correspondence. I am quite sure that you are aware of that.

How can you try to say that you hold dear our freedoms and the values of our democracy when you continue to support the unethical and anti-American actions of this President and Vice-President?

Stop using 9/11 as the “second Pearl Harbor.” With policies such as surveillance of American citizens, retroactive immunity laws, the expansion of executive power, and the torture and mistreatment of prisoners of all kinds – both here and abroad – you have undermined the values of the United States of America.

In this respect, the 9/11 attack couldn’t have been more successful as an act of terrorism; this administration, with your full support, has used it to betray what we should have been standing up for – our freedoms, our democracy, our rights as Americans. You, sir, are allowing that act to succeed in changing the very fabric of our nation.

You say we are “blessed to live in a free and effective democracy.” What remains of this “blessing” – a state of affairs hard-earned in blood and vigilance – is systematically being dismantled, and you contribute to this! Your oblique reference to God does not move me; I cannot imagine how you think God would approve of rampant greed and corruption, deceit, theft, torture, war profiteering, or throwing away the very aspects of American democracy that used to give hope to so many people here and abroad.

Senator Chambliss, after 9/11, we had the sympathy and support of most of the world – think for a moment about how we have thrown that away. Think for a moment about how a truly effective counter-terrorism policy might have reduced terrorism, rather than exponentially increasing it as this administration has done with its harmful policies and actions.

America currently disregards international and domestic laws and agreements on a level that I would never have thought possible. We have even aggressively invaded another country that had not attacked us – a deep violation of our own principles, and of the U.N. agreements for member countries.

You claim that the NSA program has foiled terrorist plots. Would you care to name a few? Can you show me someone that has been lawfully convicted on the basis of this (unconstitutional) activity?

The statement that we treat prisoners (whether at Gitmo, or in Iraq or Afghanistan – or in the countries we ship them out to for torture) in a manner that is in accordance with international law and treaty is so laughable that I am quite frankly amazed that you would still continue to make this claim.

Mr. Chambliss, I have contacted you about many issues, and although I know that your email responses are simply cut and pasted from form letters written by others, I still ask you to hold yourself accountable for the misleading statements being made in them.

Sir, your role in the Senate is to represent the interests – and the laws – of the people of Georgia and of this nation. When will you begin to take your job more seriously?

Senator, I plead with you. Revisit some of these important issues. The future of America is at stake.

These are real problems, and the way they have been handled so far will have lasting repercussions.

Won’t you begin to be part of solving these problems rather than making them even worse with your denials and your continued support of every whim of this secretive and dangerous administration?

Most sincerely-

(it’s “Dr. N.” to you, Senator)

$52M to help one state in one precise industry. Interesting.

I wonder how much monitors have been getting to check out toy manufacture. I wonder what the total budget of the New Jersey US Attorney’s office might be.

It’s good to be a paid-off crony.

Nord is also the president of Executive Women in Government, a nonprofit professional women’s organization. Sorry, women.

In two different letters, Nancy Nord has asked lawmakers not to approve legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and increase its ever more pathetic staff. She opposes increasing the maximum penalties for safety violations. She opposes making it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products. She opposed protecting industry whistle-blowers. And of course she opposes prosecuting executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

Hello? Anyone home in America?

The agency has suffered from a steady decline in its budget and staffing in recent years. Its staff numbers about 420, about half its size in the 1980s. It has only one full-time employee to test toys. And 15 inspectors are assigned to police all imports of consumer products under the agency’s supervision, a marketplace that last year was valued at $614 billion.

I am ashamed to share a syllable of my name with Nancy Nord. My mother’s name is Nancy, too. I haven’t felt this bad since people started asking me if I was related to OJ Simpson because of a character he played. Sorry, children.

The very direction of North – what Nord means – is blasting its winds in her general direction.

Anyone who doesn’t think the agency needs more resources “does not understand the gravity of the situation and does not understand the concerns that America’s parents have for the safety of their children,” Pelosi said.

Government Bad. Corporations Good. Yar yar.

Family values? Children’s safety?

Lead, good. Whistleblowers bad.

Good government? Promote the general welfare?

Bah. We don’t need your stinkin’ children.

Note the current status of the situation:

1. There is now a video that shows that Blackwater USA guards opened fire against civilians without provocation.
2. Blackwater is denying charges of arms smuggling.
3. Blackwater is back up and running in Iraq.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Finally, the government in Iraq has made a brilliant move. Because of this latest incident of civilian killings, they’ve “canceled Blackwater’s license” and demanded that all Blackwater employees leave Iraq. This is long overdue.

It’s true that the wording doesn’t work. Blackwater doesn’t appear to need a license from the Iraqi government to protect American officials. But if Blackwater still has immunity from crimes, and is free from prosecution in Iraq or here, then I really don’t see why the Iraqis cannot make a good case for their right to expel them from the country.

I don’t think any little phone call from Condi is going to change their minds.

Nothing should make them back down on this, no matter how they are pressured to do so. We have no case for supporting Blackwater’s presence. It would be just a silly show of power to insist.

Yes, the US is heavily dependent on heavily armed private contractors. Some claim that
private personnel on the US government payroll outnumber official US troops. At the same time, our government has granted them a special status with no formal accountability or oversight from Congress or anyone else. They have total immunity from Iraqi criminal prosecution (a provision that was only expected to last for a couple of months). It’s past time we changed that anyway.

“There’s no visibility on these contractors,” says Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. “Meaning no clue how much money we’re spending. They are carrying out mission-sensitive activities with virtually no oversight whatsoever.”

No American security contractor has been prosecuted in the United States or Iraq, although there have been many incidents where such security contractors have shot and killed Iraqi civilians.

The incident reports were a whitewash, and nobody did anything about it,” he said, adding that there have been a few cases where Blackwater and other companies have fired workers for killing civilians, but those same workers were back in Iraq with another company in a few months.

It is widely known, both here and in Iraq, that the Sunni Fallujah massacre (note: new link added 9-23) was revenge for the killing of four Blackwater employees in March 2004. The death toll from that attack was severe – some claim there were as many as 100,000 casualties.

Given that, it must have been a slap in the face for Iraq to hear U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker praise Blackwater in his testimony to Congress last week.

Iraqis hate Blackwater, not just because of Fallujah, but because Blackwater is clearly immune – and irresponsible – and uncontrollable. Blackwater employees seem to be able to get away with whatever they feel like doing. They are a terrible face for America. Even other security companies dislike Blackwater.

“They are untouchable. They’ve shot up other private security contractors, Iraqi military, police and civilians,” said one security contractor, who declined to give his name because of the sensitivity of the issue.

One contractor described an incident three weeks ago in which a four-vehicle Blackwater convoy pushed through a crowded Baghdad street and pointed a gun at his team, even though they waved an American flag — an indicator used by security contractors to identify themselves to one another.

There have been several fatal shootings involving Blackwater since late last year. On Christmas Eve, a Blackwater employee walking in the Green Zone stopped by an Iraqi checkpoint and, after an argument, fatally shot an Iraqi guard for Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, said an Iraqi official and a U.S. diplomat.

If I were an Iraqi, I wouldn’t care for Blackwater – at all. As an American, I don’t care for any of the private security forces, but Blackwater has become the iconic example for me of the results of “privatization” – lack of accountability or oversight or transparency, criminality/immunity, rampant corruption and war profiteering.

Of course, the US government backs the private forces in their shadow war – Blackwater more than any other company – but Iraq has the right to expel people from their own country. They can’t expel the military forces, but why can’t they kick out Blackwater?

This would give the federal government in Iraq a big boost. It might bring people together in Iraq if they felt that they do have a say in what happens in their own country – and I think ethics is on their side.

From the American side, this would refocus resentment on a single company rather than on the entire American presence. And it would show that we – sometimes – might mean what we say about our motives there. It would be a wise move all around to support Blackwater’s exit.

Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister, said: “This is such a big crime that we can’t stay silent. Anyone who wants to have good relations with Iraq has to respect Iraqis.”
He told al-Arabiya television that foreign contractors “must respect Iraqi laws and the right of Iraqis to independence on their land. These cases have happened more than once and we can’t keep silent in the face of them”.

It’s about time that Iraq challenged the US over this blanket immunity deal – especially since Americans have done nothing about it.

Iraq’s national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, said the Iraqi government should use the incident to look into overhauling private security guards’ immunity from Iraqi courts, which was granted by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer III in 2003 and later extended ahead of Iraq’s return to sovereignty.

From 2004:

Order 17 gives all foreign personnel in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority immunity from “local criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their parent states.” U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer is expected to extend Order 17 as one of his last acts before shutting down the occupation next week, U.S. officials said. The order is expected to last an additional six or seven months, until the first national elections are held.

Any decent strategist could tell you that ousting Blackwater from Iraq is a win-win situation for both America and Iraq. The cost is small – Blackwater only has about a thousand people there now, and they are all over the rest of the world anyway. It wouldn’t even cut into their profit margin. Bush says he wants to see the government pull together – well, here’s a good start. It could end up being a real turning point, a gift to the Administration.

Are they too self-absorbed and arrogant to understand that?

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and son of a wealthy Michigan auto-parts supplier. The company, headquartered in Moyock, N.C., on a 7,000-acre compound, has deeply rooted political connections in Washington.

It counts former top CIA and Defense Department officials, including Cofer Black, former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon inspector general, among its executives. Blackwater’s legal team once included Fred Fielding, now White House counsel, and now includes Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated the Monica Lewinsky and Whitewater scandals during the Clinton administration.

Erik Prince is also an extreme right-wing fundamentalist “Christian” mega-millionaire.

Maybe this administration is just too deep into the inherent corruption of the whole situation to be able to do the smart thing for everyone. Well, what will happen if they don’t? Think it through. The US can’t get away with another Fallujah now.

There is yet another solution. Is anyone at Blackwater smart enough to know when to move out? Here’s a hint: Now.

Recommended Viewing and Reading:

Jeremy Scahill describes the rise of Blackwater USA, the world’s most powerful mercenary army.

Click to view video

• Journalist Scahill Charts the Rise of Blackwater USA
• “Blackwater” Author describes the US civilian Militia Group’s relationship with BushCo. “Shadow War”
• Blackwater is part of Bremer’s Legacy: “The TROPHY Video”
• 
  U.S. rushes to smooth Iraq’s anger over Blackwater


Rice apologises for US security firm shootings

Again… note the themes.

Take a look.

Thanks for commenting and letting me know about your list, Mitch!