Blackwater Blues

This story has been moving fast, gaining steam, but beyond the details it's really the fundamental principles that should make it a no-brainer to resolve.

As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the unspoken rule of Bush’s counterinsurgency efforts over the past four years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.

Considering just how often our self-appointed spokestools proclaim the inherent Christianity of the nation, it's astonishing just how little common-sense logic is utilized in applying the Golden Rule to what we've done. Too many Americans seem to be genuinely pissed that the average Iraqi is not more grateful to us. Well, shit, how grateful do you think you would be if some bumbling oaf freed you from your oppressor (for his own reasons), wounding you in the process, and left you to simultaneously fend off a dozen or a hundred oppressors? Something about "the devil you know" might be useful here.

What this Blackwater mess is really bringing to the surface, beyond simply how corrupt and self-contained their operatives are, is how dependent this whole house of cards is on them. Already the Iraqis are simultaneously backing down on their demand for immediate expulsion of Blackwater personnel, even as they claim to have videotape proof of an unprovoked slaughter in the streets. This belies several claims made repeatedly by various Bush lackeys, including Saint Petræus:

• Sovereignty. Clearly despite all the purple-finger euphoria, Iraqis are no closer to being incharge of their own lives and government than they were four years ago. This is not even in dispute -- the decision on Blackwater was effectively taken out of their hands. This is not just a rejection of the decision they made, it is an active assertion that the decision was not theirs to make in the first place.


• The surge is working. If it was working, these things wouldn't be happening, but violence has spread largely unabated, if localized differently than before.


• The Army is in good shape. If that's the case, then why are we, not just the Iraqis, so heavily dependent on mercenary Prætorian Guards for high-level security details? It has been tacitly acknowledged that we would not be able to maintain any diplomatic or political conciliatory presence whatsoever without private security details. Private contractors now equal (or by some accounts, exceed) the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.
  
  The claim has been that even with paying PMCs four to six times the going military rate, it's still cheaper because of the extensive bureaucratic/logistical supply chain issues in the armed forces. Fair enough, but none of that explains why PMCs should be exempt from the UCMJ, or either Iraqi or American civil law.

This is bullshit. There is no reason at all for PMCs to be allowed to have some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card, to quite literally get away with murder. This is nothing new; it's been going on the entire time. The hanging and burning of Blackwater contractors in Fallujah back in '04 did not happen by accident, but rather in an utter moral vacuum. And it continues today. What's different is that this time apparently the Iraqis have enough corroborating evidence. Whether there will be actual consequences is highly doubtful; after all, Jenna Bush has a book to pimp, and no doubt Lindsay Lohan is about to do something stupid.

[Update: I think Kaplan is essentially correct in his assertions, that there is a logistical necessity for PMCs. But that is not the quibble, and really never has been. The question, once again, is one of accountability, and really should not be all that difficult to resolve if everything is indeed on the up-and-up. There are reasons for keeping this accountability chasm intact at the policy level, and none of them are good, but all of them are entirely deliberate.]