Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  Contract Killings

  THE PRIVATIZATION of power isn’t a phenomenon of the margins, a footnote to history; it’s a central dynamic of American public life. One study from the late 1990s suggests that the “privatization rate”—the rate at which public functions are being outsourced—is roughly doubling every year. On paper the federal work force nationwide, leaving the military aside, appears to total about two million people. But if you add in all the people in the private sector doing essentially government jobs with federal grants and contracts, then the figure rises by 12 or 13 million. It seems somehow not surprising that for the first time America has a president with an M.B.A. The commercialization of government probably explains why so many Washington entities are now referred to as “shops”: “lobby shop,” “counterterrorism shop.” A private company that provides people to do government work of many different kinds is known as a “body shop.” It may be that every instance of privatization can be defended on the merits—as efficient, thrifty, and wise. Surely many of them are. There’s no question that in certain ways the private sector can outperform the public sector. Users of the cursus Privatus—Federal Express, UPS, DHL—would sooner renounce citizenship than go back to relying only on the United States Postal Service. The problem is the cumulative effect of privatization across the board—projected out over decades, over a century, over two—and the leaching of management capacity from government. This is the same “misdirection” of government force that MacMullen discerns in Rome: easier to observe in retrospect, when the whole film is available, than in the brief, realtime clip any of us is allowed to see.

  An analyst at Johns Hopkins observes, “Contractors have become so big and entrenched that it’s a fiction that the government maintains any control.” One obvious recent example is the rebuilding effort in Iraq. To supply the army or provide other services, traders and contractors often traveled with Roman legions; Julius Caesar had such a person with him during the Gallic Wars, explicitly “for the sake of business.” There may have been no alternative to giving the reconstruction job in Iraq to private corporations, including giant combines like Halliburton, but the result has been an effort that defies management or accountability. Private companies are exempt from many regulations that would apply to government agencies. They can use foreign subsidiaries to avoid laws meant to restrain American companies. (Before the war, Halliburton itself used subsidiaries to do business with Iran, Iraq, and Libya, despite official American trade sanctions against all three countries.) The records of private companies can’t be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Congressional committees aren’t set up to look over the shoulders of private companies, the way they do with government departments. The evidence of widespread corruption in the Iraq rebuilding effort is beyond dispute. The rigid impartiality of many contractors has been more easily disarmed than the insurgents. Companies have overcharged the government by tens of millions just for food and gasoline. The Coalition Provisional Authority official in charge of disbursing some $80 million in one Iraqi city turns out to have been at the center of a bribes-and-contracts conspiracy: “a maelstrom of greed, sex, and gun-running,” according to one account—the kind of tale that might have come from Lepcis. But the larger issue is that orders aren’t followed “along the whole train of power”; there isn’t any train of power—just a collection of private interests. A source quoted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which issued a scathing report at the end of 2005, said simply, “The CPA was contracting, companies were contracting subcontractors, and some people who didn’t have authority such as the ministries were also awarding contracts.”

  This is the pattern everywhere in government, even when the most sensitive matters of national security are involved. More and more secret intelligence work—translation, computing, interrogation, analysis, reporting, briefing—is being farmed out to private entities. Not only is the intelligence community becoming further fragmented, but, because the new jobs pay so well, a “spy drain” is drawing officers out of the public sector and into the private market. And the drain isn’t restricted to spies: at least ninety former top officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Office of Homeland Security are now working for private companies in the domestic-security business. In a recent novel the former CIA officer Robert Baer describes what has become business as usual:

  Everyone I knew seemed to be doing it once they hit the magic fifty: Retire on a Friday, back in the building Monday morning with a shiny new green badge . . . They doubled their salaries overnight, while the companies that hired them got experts trained on the taxpayers’ tab and a straight shot into the vitals of the CIA, where they could work on landing more contracts.

  The company that fits this profile more than any other is known by the acronym SAIC, which stands for Science Applications International Corporation. Founded in 1969 to take on a small number of specific government research projects, the company has grown into something that might as well be a full-fledged government agency, with a staff of 43,000—except that it operates in its own interest and exists outside ordinary government oversight. Its annual intake from the federal government exceeds $6 billion. In some ways it is the quintessential “body shop”—it will take on any project the government wants to outsource—though “brain shop” might be a better term, because most of its work involves expertise that the government no longer has, or perhaps never did have. Its senior executives tend to be drawn from the government agencies it does business with, and they often cycle back into government for a period of time—in other words, the people who define the need are also satisfying the need. SAIC is managing preparations for the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. It has designed data-mining programs for the NSA and managed computer systems for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It was brought in when the CIA wanted to monitor private use of the Internet by its employees. After the invasion of Iraq, SAIC established a newspaper and a television station in Baghdad. Many of the efforts that SAIC has been involved in have been white elephants. The $100 million computer system it set up for the FBI had to be abandoned; so did its $1.2 billion Trailblazer system for the NSA. The media venture in Iraq, ludicrous on its face, went nowhere. But SAIC continues to seek and win federal contracts: it currently holds 10,000 of them, all told. Its appetites are indiscriminate, pursuing whatever is available simply because it is, and ultimately for SAIC’s own ends. Ramsay MacMullen’s comment about effective government functioning comes to mind—how the “train of power” must link authority at the center with public purpose at the margin: “At every point of connection the original intent must be transmitted as it was received. Otherwise it will come to nothing.” One former executive has said about SAIC, “We used to joke that it really was Kentucky Fried Chicken consulting.”

  Meanwhile, the government is turning the job of border police over to multinational contractors, a task that will in turn be subcontracted out to dozens of smaller companies, further attenuating any attempts at government control. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman are among the corporations that indicated they would submit bids to build a high-tech “virtual fence” along the Mexican border, with an array of motion detectors, satellite monitors, and aerial drones. A Homeland Security Department official conceded the abdication of government leadership, saying to the companies, “We’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business.”

  The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can’t help lingering over the concept of “franchise,” wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility; it comes from the Old French word franc, meaning “free.” Because free people were those who had been granted certain rights, the word came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise is to exercise your right to vote. Only
much later, in the mid twentieth century, did the idea of being granted “certain rights” acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company’s services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it. Kellogg Brown & Root has a franchise on the building of military bases. SAIC seems to have a franchise on setting up government computer systems. The English dictionary published under the auspices of Wikipedia may not be the most scholarly or authoritative reference book, but because of the way it’s compiled, with entries from people at large, it’s the one that comes closest to reflecting popular understandings of language at any given moment. In the Wiktionary, the commercial meaning of “franchise” is now the primary definition. The definition involving political freedom and the right to vote comes fifth.

  Looking back at the history of “franchise,” then, it’s tempting to write this epitaph: Here, in miniature, is the political history of America.

  4

  The Outsiders

  When People Like Us Meet People Like Them

  When given the German command he went out with the quaint preconception that here was a subhuman people which would somehow prove responsive to Roman law. . . . He therefore breezed in—right into the heart of Germany—as if on a picnic.

  —Velleius Paterculus, on the disaster at Teutoburg Forest

  What struck me most about the palace was the completely self-referential character of it. It was all about us, not about them. People would walk around the palace with a mixture of venal and idealistic motives. None of them knew Iraq.

  —an American diplomat inside Baghdad’s Green Zone

  IN THE YEAR 15 A.D. the legions commanded by the Roman general Germanicus—stepgrandson of the recently departed emperor Augustus, adopted son of the new emperor Tiberius, father of the future emperor Caligula—picked their way deep into the thick forests and forbidding marshes east of the Rhine, looking for the spot where, six years earlier, a terrible slaughter had taken place. The scene is set by Tacitus in the first book of his Annals. Germanicus had been waging a campaign against one of the German tribes when, on an impulse, he set out with his army to discover the battlefield known to history as Teutoburg Forest. There, in 9 A.D., three legions commanded by Publius Quinctilius Varus had been tricked and then ambushed by a smaller German force and virtually annihilated. The Germans had also made off with the three silver legionary eagles, which symbolized the honor of each legion and the power of Rome—a profoundly shameful event. It was the most humiliating defeat ever suffered by a Roman army. The repercussions were staggering, and not only for Rome. We live with them to this day.

  Here’s Tacitus:

  The dismal tract [was] hideous to sight and memory. Varus’ first camp, with its broad sweep and measured spaces for officers and eagles, advertised the labours of three legions: then a half-ruined wall and shallow ditch showed that there the now broken remnant had taken cover. In the plain between were bleaching bones, scattered or in little heaps, as the men had fallen, fleeing or standing fast. Hard by lay splintered spears and limbs of horses, while human skulls were nailed prominently on the tree-trunks. In the neighboring groves stood the savage altars at which they had slaughtered the tribunes and the chief centurions.

  Germanicus ordered his men to gather the remains of the fallen into a funeral pyre. When the fires had been lit, he said, “Let us be soon gone from here, and let the mists of time cloud its very existence.”

  And so they left. Not long afterward Germanicus would fight a series of inconclusive battles with the very German forces that had humbled Varus. A few years later the leader of those Germans, a chieftain named Arminius, was killed during some sort of family squabble. But the mists of time have not clouded the memory of Teutoburg Forest, because the central lesson is perpetually compelling.

  On its mental map Rome pictured itself as all-important, all-knowing, all-powerful. The inevitable corollary to this perspective was a view of outsiders as often unfathomable, certainly inferior, and in any event not worth the bother of trying to understand. The great physician Galen once wrote, “I am no more writing for Germans than for wolves and bears.” Such an outlook is typical of empires. And for Rome, much of the time, an oblivious frame of mind did not really matter: Roman power was overwhelming, and the fear it instilled could prove as effective as actual force. Sometimes obliviousness doesn’t matter for America, either. But often—and increasingly—it matters a great deal. How people in the outside world think and behave, and respond to America’s thinking and behavior, are variables that must be taken into account. They are as important as objective factors like the strength of an economy and the size of an army. Smugness or indifference can prove catastrophic. It did for Varus.

  Four Days in September

  AFTER THE PILGRIMAGE of Germanicus, the Teutoburg battlefield was lost to history for nearly 2,000 years. The funeral pyres burned down to ash. Trees and marshes reclaimed the killing ground. The true location of Teutoburg Forest was the subject of learned—and often misguided—speculation for centuries (a monument stands at the wrong place), but the actual site was not in fact rediscovered until the mid-1980s, when a British officer stationed in Germany, Tony Clunn, by avocation an archaeologist, turned up some Roman coins in a remote field near the town of Kalkriese, near Osnabrück, in Lower Saxony. He had been looking for the Teutoburg battlefield for years, was deeply knowledgeable about the literature and the terrain, and had decided to play some hunches. One of them paid off. The coins at Kalkriese led to more coins, and then to military equipment and personal items like keys and hairpins and cloak clasps. Eventually the earth divulged the horrifying scale of the calamity that had befallen Varus and his army: the debris field from the protracted battle covered an expanse of ground three miles wide and four miles long.

  P. Quinctilius Varus was a man typical of his class and his time. He was a lawyer, connected by marriage to the imperial family, and had served as governor of the provinces of Africa and Syria, where he seems to have ably used his office to enrich himself. He was not of a temperament to deal patiently with those he regarded as troublemakers or inferiors. Once, in Syria, he ordered the crucifixion of 2,000 insurgents to quell an outbreak of unrest. (It worked.) Assessments of his competence are mixed. A man who knew and disliked him, Velleius Paterculus, described Varus as “somewhat ponderous in mind and body.” But when he was appointed governor of Germania, there was little reason to believe that disaster lay ahead. By steady accretion the power of Rome had advanced to the Rhine and the Danube, and the next logical step was to incorporate the lands that lay beyond: “free Germany,” what is today the German heartland, all the way east to the Elbe. Roman advance encampments had already been planted. Roads had been cut. Relations with some of the German tribes appeared to be stable. No one had suggested to Varus that he would, in effect, be greeted with flowers, but he shared the conviction that the Roman occupation of this prospective new province was a done deal; that the Germans were manageable; and that the task ahead was mainly to garner revenue, dispense justice, and otherwise administer this territory, which would soon be absorbed formally into the imperial system. The moment for nation building was at hand. “The Germans,” Paterculus writes, “a race combining maximum ferocity with supreme guile (and being born liars besides), fawned upon Varus, making much of their lawsuits, marvelling at his jurisprudence and flattering him regarding his civilizing mission.”

  As the summer of 9 A.D. neared its end, Varus led his force—some 15,000 legionaries and an equal number of camp followers —from the north of Germany toward winter bases on the Rhine, secure in a presumption of superiority to any enemy. But there was one matter to attend to. Varus had been told by Arminius, a prince of the Cherusci, about a small uprising by one of the German tribes, and he resolved to make a detour and put it down. Another German chieftain warned Varus not to trust Arminius. Varus paid no heed. Had not Arminius served bravely with Rome? Even been made a
citizen and given honors?

  At the time, much of Germany was densely covered with woodland, and clearings were as likely to be sodden bog as dry land. The opening scene of Gladiator, with its muddy fortifications and gnarly trees, vividly captures this unfriendly environment—so different from the open countryside and broad vistas that the Romans knew from the Mediterranean. Arminius led Varus deep into unknown territory. “The Romans were having a hard time of it, felling trees, building roads, and bridging places that required it,” the historian Cassius Dio writes. “They had with them many wagons and many beasts of burden as if in a time of peace; moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them.” Military planners today speak of a “teeth-to-tail” ratio—the ratio of fighting personnel to ancillary support personnel. Americans have a very long tail, and the Romans did too—a significant encumbrance in a guerrilla war or an insurgency. The Roman lines thinned out along the narrow trackways, stretching for miles and miles. Fate proved unkind: violent rains set in, turning fields into marsh, and marsh into swamp. “While the Romans were in such difficulties,” Cassius Dio goes on, “the barbarians suddenly surrounded them on all sides.” The Romans were about to get a lesson in what today would be called asymmetric warfare. For three days Varus and his legions held out, defending themselves against the barbarian attacks while trying to retreat toward the nearest Roman base, at Haltern.