22. For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166 (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68–70 (Mylroie).
23. Jon Wiener, “Obama’s Limits: An Interview with Andrew Bacevich,” The Nation, August 28, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/350252/obama_s
_limits_an_interview_with_andrew_bacevich. Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backward when the United States invaded Iraq (Scheuer, “Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War,” MSNBC, July 9, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8524679). Peter Bergen agrees: “Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11” (Bergen, “The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages,” Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 246: “Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.”
24. I am not the first to notice the analogy. See, e.g., Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, “The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications,” U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002, http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02winter/smith
.pdf, 104.
25. Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1974), 22.
26. Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, eds., Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286.
27. “Iraq Reviewing Security Firms after Blackwater Shooting,” FoxNews.com, September 18, 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297153,00.html.
28. “The former Betsy Prince—Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister—married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (‘I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees” (Ben Van Heuvelen, “The Bush Administration’s Ties to Blackwater,” Salon, October 2, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater
_bush). Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006); Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books/Avalon, 2007). On March 30, 2009, Erik Prince announced that he was resigning as chief executive officer of Xe.
29. David Isenberg, “Corporate Mercenaries—Part 2: Myths and Mystery,” Asia Times, May 19, 2004, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE20Ak02.html.
30. Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater, also owned a PIC, Total Intelligence Solutions, whose leadership included J. Cofer Black, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center; Robert Richer, the former associate deputy director of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations; and Enrique “Ric” Prado, from the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and before that the CIA’s “paramilitary” Special Operations Group (Jeremy Scahill, “Blackwater: CIA Assassins?” The Nation, August 20, 2009, http://www.the
nation.com/doc/20090831/scahill1).
