Blackwater and the drunken colonialism of the Iraq War

A new report about the thuggish behavior of the private security contractor puts the conflict in a different light

Baghdad
(Image credit: (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban))

Traditional colonialism has been basically dead for several decades, but its trappings are still with us. Just look at the Iraq War — while the U.S. occupation wasn't concerned with setting up rubber plantations and the like, it did look to the age of imperialism when it came to pacifying a subject population.

Instead of extracting resources from a prostrate Iraq, we spent trillions on a prolonged and ultimately ineffective counterinsurgency campaign. Let's call it "drunken colonialism," in which one nation invades, dominates, and trashes another for no benefit to itself or anyone else.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.