Oxfam Sunday & Monday - Blackwater

A quiet few days in the shop, with nothing really of note happening. One of the things about working in a book shop is that you do come across something worth reading every so often. This time I came across this:

It's a kind of exposé of a company that's at the heart of a new phenomena: the privatisation of war. Mercenary companies have always been around, ever since the middle ages with the Italian condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood and the White Company.

(The Battle of San Romano, by Paolo Uccelo, in the National Gallery, shows a battle between two condottiere armies).

The modern mercenary armies really started with the decline in state armies at the end of World War 2, with the private armies started by David Stirling after he left the SAS (detailed here in Adam Curtis's excellent documentary, The Mayfair Set):

but the end of the Cold War and the "war on terror" has accelerated the process to be a multi-billion dollar business. It's an intriguing book, concentrating on Iraq, but also on other parts of the world, notably South America. In the same way that David Stirling privatised Britain's foreign policy, so Blackwater appears to be doing the same to America's.