[MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] Krugman: Hired Gun Fetish

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Krugman explains his first two paragraphs from the NY Times article 
(below) in this blog entry:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/tax-farming/

--Mike


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/opinion/28krugman.html

N.Y. Times
September 28, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Hired Gun Fetish

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush 
administration is to imagine that it's a vast experiment concocted by mad 
political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation 
systematically ignores everything we've learned over the past few 
centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, 
nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice 
Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming -- giving individuals the 
right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take -- went out with 
the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as "useless and 
dangerous" more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries 
made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central 
to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points 
out in a new report, "the private military industry has suffered more 
losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined."

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. 
They're heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they're 
private employees who don't answer to military discipline. On the other 
hand, they don't seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And 
they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two 
weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by 
gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing 
randomly at a car that didn't get out of their way.

What we do know is that more than 20 civilians were killed, including the 
couple and child in the car. And the Iraqi version of events is entirely 
consistent with many other documented incidents involving security 
contractors.

For example, Mr. Singer reminds us that in 2005 "armed contractors from 
the Zapata firm were detained by U.S. forces, who claimed they saw the 
private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but 
also U.S. Marines." The contractors were not charged.  In 2006, employees 
of Aegis, another security firm, posted a "trophy video" on the Internet 
that showed them shooting civilians, and employees of Triple Canopy, yet 
another contractor, were fired after alleging that a supervisor engaged in 
"joy-ride shooting" of Iraqi civilians.

Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On 
Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and 
killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of 
the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees 
reportedly shot an employee of Iraq's Interior Ministry, leading to an 
armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren't the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 
American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds 
would surely still be alive if it weren't for the hatred such incidents 
engender.

Which raises the question, why are Blackwater and other mercenary outfits 
still playing such a big role in Iraq?

Don't tell me that they are irreplaceable. The Iraq war has now gone on 
for four and a half years -- longer than American participation in World 
War II. There has been plenty of time for the Bush administration to find 
a way to do without mercenaries, if it wanted to.

And the danger out-of-control military contractors pose to American forces 
has been obvious at least since March 2004, when four armed Blackwater 
employees blundered into Fallujah in the middle of a delicate military 
operation, getting themselves killed and precipitating a crisis that 
probably ended any chance of an acceptable outcome in Iraq.

Yet Blackwater is still there. In fact, last year the State Department 
gave Blackwater the lead role in diplomatic security in Iraq.

Mr. Singer argues that reliance on private military contractors has let 
the administration avoid making hard political choices, such as admitting 
that it didn't send enough troops in the first place.  Contractors, he 
writes, "offered the potential backstop of additional forces, but with no 
one having to lose any political capital." That's undoubtedly part of the 
story.

But it's also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to 
privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers' 
money to give lucrative contracts to its friends -- people like Erik 
Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. 
You might think that national security would take precedence over the 
fetish for privatization -- but remember, President Bush tried to keep 
airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.

So the privatization of war -- no matter how badly it works -- is just 
part of the pattern.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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