Mercs

Al in his usual polemic, rambling style has some interesting thoughts, on the recent Kos says, “Screw ’em” much ado.

However I find his feelings on the mercenary deaths (“Nothing requires us to cry crocodile tears over people who, for money, knowingly risk their lives in foreign military adventures.”) confusing. I understand that the Liberal American bloggers see a difference between “our boys”, and those “soliders of foturne”, but its not the critique I would expect from a leftist. For me its all more ambiguous.

You see I think supporting the US military industrial complex as it wages global terror in the support of transnational capitalism is morally wrong. But I have to stop short of actually judging the individual soliders, I don’t know their stories, but for many a military career is a respectable option, with a decent salary that beats the hell out of working at Walmart after all the decent jobs have been shipped over seas. People making hard bad choices in tight situations deserve people working to make better choices available.

The mercenaries are largely in the same boat. People like Blackwater USA are off-shore contractors hiring the professional soldiers left in the wake of the decades of civil wars, social upheaval, and economic collapse all over the world. Much of that upheaval which is easily traced back to the U.S. imperialist policies or the corporations they serve.

Dying is just another service to be outsourced.

(ohh, I just got an email pointing to this Alternet story, Bill Berkowitz: Mercenaries ‘R’ Us. Yeah, he probably says it all better. I love blogging.)