Steve Fainaru's "Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq"

The American military was able to keep its troop levels and casualty count down, but the feat was deceptive. Never in the history of warfare, at least not since Medieval European warfare, has a nation so heavily relied on mercenaries and private contractors to enforce an occupation and maintain the pretenses of nation-building.

"As Iraq came apart, not soon to be put back together," Fainaru writes, "the private security contractors helped confine it to that far-away place, tens of thousands of shadow soldiers, their roles and identities as vague as the war itself. You didn't have to draft them, or run them through Congress. You didn;t even have to know they were there."

Except that the mercs with their lawlessness and arrogance and the hatred they sowed among the Iraqi population proved to be part of the occupation’s problem, not its solutions.

The Bush administration enabled and ultimately encouraged the duplicity at the expense of the American military and Iraqi stability by purposefully loosening the chain of accountability. Mercenary acts of murder and terrorism were rampant. But by 2007, Fainaru writes, “the military had brought charges against dozens of soldiers and marines in Iraq, including sixty-four servicemen linked to murders. Not a single case had been brought against a security contractor.”

And so the second delusional trajectory Fainaru traces is the Bush administration’s scornful, co-dependent relationship with mercenaries.

The administration's smugness toward mercenaries, expressed in countless acts of arms-length derision through the Pentagon or the State Department, who ostensibly supervised private contractors, makes it difficult to be too judgmental of judgmental of mercenaries. They provided a service that was in demand, however brutal the service. If they were lawless, it's because their overseers allowed them to be--wanted them to be--lawless. Mercenaries were the errand boys of Bush's war.

As in all lines of work, there are good ones and there are bad ones. Same goes with mercenary companies. Some “shockingly” obeyed the law and respected their host country, Fainaru writes. In the words of a convoy manager for one such company, ArmorGroup, “If you come to someone else’s country and don’t abide by their laws, it’s just the height of arrogance.” Some obeyed nothing but their own rules, if that. The consequences were often catastrophic.

Jon Coté, whose body was finally identified a year and five months after he disappeared (the body returned to the United States headless), was a good man who’d fallen victim to the worst of two worlds he’d ensnared himself in, two worlds that mirrored each other by a few shards: private security contractors and insurgents.