New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (pictured) shows she's out of her league in commenting on the Blackwater controversy. Not only does she misuse the word "mercenary," but she shows only a frail grasp of American military history.
In her October 3 column, "Sinking in a Swamp of Blackwater," Dowd makes several factual errors:
1. She abuses the word "mercenary" (this is getting pretty tired), twisting the pejorative in ways that do not apply to its definitions in law or the dictionary. She mis-applies the word repeatedly in her column. Under the Geneva Conventions, a security guard is not a mercenary, and people serving their own governments in private capacity are not either.
2. Dowd writes, "Americans have been antimercenary since the British sent 30,000 German Hessians after George Washington in the Revolutionary War." The statement as it stands is perfectly true. The Hessians were fighting another country's war merely for money. Nothing more. The Continental Congress even denounced the arrival of the "mercenaries" - it used the word correctly - in the Declaration of Independence.
However, if Dowd accepts her own invented definition of mercenary and applies it to the Revolutionary War, then her own premise is wrong. George Washington's own aide de camp, the Marquis de Lafayette, was a citizen of France while in the Continental Army. The general who trained and disciplined Washington's forces at the lowest point of the war was the great Prussian general, Baron von Steuben. The chief engineer of Washington's army after 1776 was a young officer from Poland, Tadeusz Kościuszko who, among other things, contributed to the American victory at Saratoga. Another young Polish officer, Count Casimir Pulaski, served on Washington's own staff and is remembered as the father of the American cavalry. Pulaski died of his wounds in the Revolution.
Private American businessmen also fought, in their private capacity, in the American Revolution. They were the privateers, who built a navy far larger and more effective than the government's Continental Navy. Washington himself was part owner of a privateer warship as one of his wartime investments. These private warships, that were authorized by Congress but not under Washington's military chain of command, were vital to winning the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
3. Dowd also takes several shots at Blackwater owner Erik Prince's religion. Those might not be factual errors. They're just signs of Dowd's own bigotry.
