Blackwater is a private company that does the dirty work for America in various wars, both covert and those we know about all too well. It began only 10 years ago as a sort of cheerful paintball and shooting range in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, but these days it has some 20,000 mercenaries on its books (the “whores of war”), not to mention a whole bunch of quasi-military aircraft, a military base, lots and lots of guns and connections with precisely the right people. It was brought into existence by Erik Prince, a somewhat right-of-centre Roman Catholic...