"I pledge allegiance to my paycheque" (Globe and Mail Vomit Alert)

When four Americans were dug out of a shallow grave on Tuesday after a convoy attack outside Baghdad, it was a replay of a strange and disgraceful moment in the evolution of modern warfare.

We all remember the four Americans found in Fallujah on March 31, their bodies burned and mutilated and things resembling torsos left to swing on a bridge. The killings seemed more suited to the 17th century - bits of Oliver Cromwell all over London - than anything 2004-ish. I was horrified. I used to think we had moved on since Charles II, but now we see hyena-like mob killings in military clashes.

This is the time when emotion needs to be tempered by thought, reason over passion, as Pierre Trudeau always believed. My human feelings changed once I studied the Fallujah bridge scene with more care. The four men killed were not U.S. soldiers. They were mercenaries, who worked for Blackwater USA, a firm that is a small part of a huge industry that contracts out hired "security guards" - read mercenaries - to nations, organizations and individuals that can afford to employ them. At least three of the four Americans in their shallow grave had worked for Halliburton, the biggest private contractor in Iraq. After learning this, and thanks to the fine reporting of Salon.com, Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, and British newspapers more skeptical than North American papers, many things fell into place.

There are 15,000 "private personnel" in Iraq, minus the ones killed. There are more of them than troops from any ally including Britain, another reason for Tony Blair not to send British soldiers, aside from Bush II saying he didn't have to if it would lose him votes. They weren't needed. (This raises two questions: Is Mr. Blair dumber than Bush II? And how is this possible?)

Companies hire mercenaries from all nations, which explains what Fijians and Nepalese, employed by a firm called Global Risk, are doing there. A firm called Erinys hires paramilitaries to guard oil fields; many are the notorious South African war dogs who fought for apartheid.

My first charitable thought was that the mercenaries were the same cannon fodder as regular soldiers. This is not quite true. The typical soldier fights because he has no other chance in life, but also out of some degree of patriotism or feeling for his fellow grunts. The mercenary, say, a former Green Beret trained at taxpayer expense, can earn $1,000 (U.S.) a day from Halliburton. His loyalty is to himself or his HR supervisor, but his salary is ultimately paid by U.S. taxpayers. Mercenaries hired from poor countries earn zilch.

So there are three levels: The regular U.S. Army soldier; the military version of an American Nike store clerk; and the military version of an Indonesian Nike sweatshop worker. One moment they're sewing crop tops for U.S. teenagers, the next moment they're dying for them too, all at minimum wage.

And they're unpoliced. When a U.S. company sent employees to Bosnia and Kosovo, some committed sex crimes. Its Bosnia site manager filmed himself raping two young women, Mr. Singer reports. But they weren't prosecuted because they fall into a gap in the law. But to be on the safe side, contractors now hire lobbyists. Blackwater's lobbyists are reportedly run by a pal of U.S. House majority leader Tom DeLay. The firm also employs Mr. DeLay's wife.

Beside its story, Salon runs an astounding picture of U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer in Iraq with his bodyguard, a big fat guy with a submachine gun. The guard works for Blackwater.

Thinking versus feeling: I think I shall no longer give a damn about the fate of mercenaries. Their deaths are predictable workplace accidents. (I bet a lot of Blackwater employees are wishing they hadn't lied on their résumé about speaking conversational Farsi. They should have said they were allergic to sand.) The corporation didn't care about them, they cared less for the corporation, and they sold their bodies to the highest bidder. The last consideration in this whole reeking equation was the welfare of the Iraqi citizen.

These are grim times: My reading now is divided between exposés of the Bush II administration and war poetry. W.B. Yeats's 1919 poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death seems to apply to private-sector war:

If war has become a private, money-making enterprise, I hope I shall never live in a country that permits it. What's worse, corporate war is being waged here with a different extremist religion on each side. I'm an atheist, but didn't Jesus kick moneymen like Blackwater out of the temple? And I know nothing of extreme Islam's attitude to money, only to women. The religious don't understand atheists; I don't understand them. I endorse Irish writer Dylan Moran, who says, "All religion is just someone who has an imaginary friend."

We are seeing a private-sector religious war fought on behalf of the oil industry and the American Radical Right that is spreading terrorism around the globe like purple loosestrife.

It's pleasurable to rely on feeling alone, but chastening to think. If only we made it a rule to combine the two, we would do much better as humans.

Is this what you are referring to? You have an excellent memory.

Canada's ugly antecedent is known as the Somalia affair: the 1993 torture and murder of a Somali teenager by Canadian airborne soldiers, and the culture of racism and brutality in the ranks that it exposed. The Somalia revelations during 1994 and 1995 anguished the nation and traumatized the Canadian military. The perpetrators were court-martialed. But a military inquiry continues into the events surrounding the murder as well as the chain of command -- and what looks like a cover-up -- all the way to the Department of National Defense in Ottawa. The government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, which was not in office at the time of the murder, has had to preside over the unpleasant aftermath. It was buffeted last week when its nominee to become Canada's top military officer, Air Force Lt. Gen. Jean Boyle, was described in press reports as being under investigation for his handling of documents related to the Somalia inquiry. Defense Minister David Collenette, shepherding Boyle through a grueling introductory news conference, said "Gen. Boyle is not under investigation" but is cooperating with the inquiry. Boyle said the documents in question were "in no way connected to Somalia. " But he was pressed by reporters to explain his earlier insistence that the same documents did not exist. After whispered counsel from Collenette, Boyle said the issue was "a matter for the investigators." The Canadian airborne was disbanded in January after the murder of Shidane Arone, a teenage Somali thief, was followed by embarrassing videotaped footage of racism and brutal hazing in the regiment formerly known for its wartime heroics. One segment depicted Canada's U.N. peacekeepers in Somalia referring to local citizens as "nig-nogs" and joking about hunting Somalis as trophies. Another tape showed a black airborne recruit crawling through a gantlet of blows and a shower of human waste with the words "I love KKK" scrawled on his back. That soldier later said he hadn't minded the treatment, in the context of the hazing ritual, and didn't consider his buddies racists.

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