What a surprise!

Blackwater is back in business in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has basically admitted that they don't have the power to force the company out of their country. Now there's talk of resolving the matter of the little massacre last weekend by offering compensation to the bereaved. Who do you suppose will be paying that blood money? Blackwater or the American taxpayers?

According to the Guardian, a UK daily, some mercenaries think Iraq has been drying up as a market for their distinctive services already. The scary thought you have to have about businesses like Blackwater, Aegis, etc., is that, like any other business, they'll want to create new markets when old ones are exhausted. It's the same thought you have to have about Halliburton. That company's apologists always like to argue that nobody else can do what Halliburton does. For me, that begs the question: why does it exist? In the aftermath of World War I people around the world understood that it was a bad thing for businesses to have a stake in war. But for some Americans today, "war profiteering" is a dirty word, a libel. I hope, however, that with sufficient repetition on TV or in the halls of Congress we'll get accustomed to the term again.

Credit where it's due: this item comes from the New York Post, of all places, and from an author who is still gung-ho for the war overall. Maybe he's just old school.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Scahill, the man who wrote the book on Blackwater, testified them in front of a Congressional committee today. The Nation has a transcript and a YouTube clip of Scahill.