“Hired guns”, “assassinations by contract”, or “stability operations”, call them what you may, the saga of the Bush-era for-profit-wars continues.

The hunting and killing of Jihadists emerged this week as yet another lucrative form of privatizing war a millions of dollars task outsourced by the C.I.A. to Blackwater, the ominous death contractor who reaped over $1 billion dollars thanks to no-bid contracts servicing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to the securing of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The details of this outsourcing, which ex Vice President Cheney managed to keep concealed from Congress back in 2002, fit into what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called “the American way of war” during a speech on “transformational strategy” in September of 2008 at the National Defense University. 

“Stability Operations” a Field Manual released last year, was trumpeted to military contractors by Serviam Magazine as “Good news for private companies, nonprofit charities, and others involved in global stability operations: Your opportunities to do more have just multiplied.”  The same source praised “Stability Operations” as the “biggest doctrinal breakthrough” among other reasons because “the U.S. Army has officially embraced partnerships with private companies, nonprofit charities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as part of its evolving military doctrine.”

Outsourcing war is fundamentally about making profits and becoming blissfully free from accountability.  Ex-Vice President Dick Cheney and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld understood this premise very well, wasted no time, and had no qualms feasting billions of taxpayer’s dollars, and squandering the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians and over 5,000 American soldiers.

As soon as Blackwater’s patrons left office, the company that triggered the bloodbath of Fallujah in Iraq, has no more no-bid contracts coming its way. Now with the tide out and a very bad reputation for wantonly killing Iraqi civilians, Blackwater changed its name to “Xe” which meaning many reporters have failed to elicit from the company spokeswoman Anne Tyrrel.

The name “Xe” might stand for the symbol for the element xenon, a colorless, odorless gas, yet the former and murky Blackwater is far from being an inert, colorless gas.  Xenon in Greek means “strange”, and a compound of this otherwise inert gas, “xenon trioxide” is highly explosive.   Such is the explosive reality when waging war is outsourced to strangers, merely to maximize profits and skirt moral and lawful accountability.