Privatizing war
Today's WaPo reports,
In any event, with an estimated 25,000 hired mercenaries working in the country, there doesn't appear to much incentive for them to promote good will among the population. They're hired guns - their job is to shoot people and bringing peace to Iraq would put them out of a job. Worse, their lawless cowboy tactics often brings retribution against our regular troops. As far the Iraqis are concerned - all Westerners look alike.
And think about this, the US government destroyed the entire city of Falluja because four of these private guns for hire got the payback they might probably have deserved for wantonly killing innocent civilians. Is it any wonder the Iraqis hate us?
Employees of private security firms are immune from prosecution in Iraq, under an order adopted into law last year by Iraq's interim government. The most severe punishment that can be applied to them is revocation of their license and dismissal from their job, U.S. officials said. Their heavy presence stems in large part from the Pentagon's attempts to keep troop numbers down by privatizing jobs that would once have been performed by American forces.I wonder if that was when Bremer was still in charge of the Iraqi government and was merrily making laws privatizing their national industries, that would protect US business interests while undermining the common good of the Iraqi people?
In any event, with an estimated 25,000 hired mercenaries working in the country, there doesn't appear to much incentive for them to promote good will among the population. They're hired guns - their job is to shoot people and bringing peace to Iraq would put them out of a job. Worse, their lawless cowboy tactics often brings retribution against our regular troops. As far the Iraqis are concerned - all Westerners look alike.
And think about this, the US government destroyed the entire city of Falluja because four of these private guns for hire got the payback they might probably have deserved for wantonly killing innocent civilians. Is it any wonder the Iraqis hate us?
posted by Libby Spencer at 12:55 PM
1 Comments:
And yet more encouraging is the news that heavily armed paramilitaries from Blackwater, the private security firm, fresh from Iraq have begun to appear on the streets of...New Orleans. You can read about it at http://www.truthout.org. What an altogether CLEVER way to circumvent the Posse Comitatus act! Field you very own private militia, hirelings accountable strictly to their employers' bidding (thereby cutting out those pesky citizens from the chain of authority), AND they come with plausible deniability already installed! What could be more perfect? Just the ticket for those messy "Third World-type" situations where you want a free hand to act along with the means to control the flow of information, particularly the flow of information OUT of the "conflict zone". You need look no further than the Israeli Defense Forces for your model; those people really know how to deal with activists (they used to call'em "outside agitatahs" down South in the 60s) and those nosy journalists over in Gaza and the West Bank. So you need to whack a few of them? Well, since you've got the accountability thing nailed down, you get to make your point with no fear of consequences. Should work here, right? Sheer genius. It's like the Gestapo with a profit motive. As Firesign Theatre used to sing on one of their albums, "We're Bringing the War Back Home Where It Ought to Have Been Before". But I gotta say, these Neocons make old Tricky Dick and J.Edgar Hoover look like dilettantes, and they've got better technology to keep track of the malcontents, too. Why, even now some fella from the FBI or the NSA or somethin' could be figurin' out who I am, not that I've got anything to worry about there. Bein' how they're all such REASONABLE GUYS after all...
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