The Blackwater story keeps growing in both the outrage it is causing and in the political importance of that outrage. It’s also increasing in the amount of trouble it’s causing for the State Department and the US.
We’re starting to see reaction now from both sides of the argument. You’d think when an entire country was accusing your company of killing its citizens, that you’d try to show some humility or even remorse. But not our Blackwater, nope.
If anyone had any illusions about what the State Department’s reaction would be for employing Blackwater, or what Blackwater itself would say, those illusions were largely shattered on Wednesday.
The State Department’s official stance: The “witnesses” are lying, and it’s too hard to investigate a crime in Iraq anyway.
QUESTION: But you still maintain that this was a defense action in response to an attack. This is — that’s not, apparently, what the Iraqis are saying.
CASEY: You know, what I know and what Sean said yesterday is the convoy came under attack and there was defensive fire as a result of that.
There are various — there are eyewitness accounts that say a whole variety of different things as to what the sequence was and where fire came from and all that. That’s what the investigation has to figure out.
And I don’t — I don’t want to try and assert for you that things happened in a specific order of events, because I just don’t know that’s true.
QUESTION: OK. This is different from an eyewitness account. This is the Iraqi investigation. So you’re discounting their investigation…
The battle lines have been drawn on Blackwater, and the response from the neocons is pretty breathtaking. Reason number one why America has to tolerate PMC mercs in Iraq? You’d better if you want our troops home.
Iraqi government restrictions on security contractor Blackwater USA could mean a range of complications for US involvement in the country–potentially even undermining current plans to remove some troops on the ground, reports the Wall Street Journal in a story by August Cole and Neil King, Jr.
After an incident on Sunday in which Blackwater security personnel killed Baghdad civilians during a fight with insurgents, the government of Iraq announced that it plans to deny the firm permission to continue operations.
“The incident may increase strains between the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,” said the Journal. “The State Department relies heavily on Blackwater to guard its diplomatic compound within Iraq’s Green Zone and also to provide security for U.S. diplomats as they travel around Iraq. The work often calls for Blackwater to draw on its fleet of armed helicopters, which give it an arsenal that other security contractors lack.”
Coming at an “awkward time” for the White House, according to the Journal, the incident follows on the heels of an announcement last week that the US plans to withdraw as many as 30,000 troops by July.
“As the U.S. diminishes its military footprint,” Cole and King write, “it is almost certain to rely more heavily on private-security companies to guard the tens of thousands of nonmilitary U.S. personnel working in Iraq.”
“Security contractors, who are more lightly armed than their American military counterparts, play an important role protecting not just U.S. officials but also employees of the many companies working on rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure,” continued the Journal.”Blackwater is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq, with some 1,000 contractors there, most of them American. Picking up any slack should Blackwater’s operations be interrupted or cease would be a tall order for rivals.”
“The reason there is such a strong business for personal security details is that the United States military and the Diplomatic Security Service don’t have the manpower to fulfill the requirement,” Ray DuBois, a former undersecretary of the Army, told the paper.
Now that’s a hell of an admission. With tens of thousands of PMC mercs in-country, we’re supposed to believe that the removal of Blackwater’s 1,000 troops will in fact delay the President’s “planned withdrawal of military troops”? Are these Blackwater personnel that vital AND that irreplaceable? If that’s the case, why isn’t the military handling it?
It’s because we’re in over our heads in Iraq…badly. We don’t have enough people, even with the surge and even with the MASSIVE influx of PMC mercs. We need all those personnel just to keep Iraq from falling completely apart, and keeping the Maliki government stable for the express purpose of having a base to use for future Middle East wars, and we can’t do it. We’re being told that 30,000 brave US troops made a difference in the surge, when the whole time we’ve been fighting on a shoestring and using tend of thousands of paid mercs to shore up our forces.
And if the Maliki government starts becoming a problem, and standing in the way? They start becoming the enemy too. It seems ludicrous, the government WE installed suddenly becoming the bad guys.
And yet that’s exactly what we’re being told: if the Iraqis kick Blackwater out, well then the Decider may not decide to bring our men and women in uniform home. Once again we see the right using the left’s logical argument against America, in this case the argument that Iraq’s security situation is really much much worse than the government is admitting.
And now the government is basically admitting it. They are admitting that we can’t walk around Baghdad without 1,000 Blackwater troops at all times.
The bizarre logic here escapes me. The surge is working so well that our own CIA agents — trained for months at “The Farm” in Virginia to learn how to kill a man with a ballpoint pen, and that sort of thing — are now afraid to walk out the front door without a bevy of allegedly trigger-happy men toting machine guns and firing indiscriminantly?
My God, what was it like in Baghdad before the awesome power of the surge?
Indeed, Will Bunch points out the towering hypocrisy coming from the Wet Your Pajamas crew.
Movements of key CIA station personnel in Baghdad–along with most State department diplomats and teams building police stations and schools–have been frozen for the second day in a row, according to a State department source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Essentially, the CIA, State department and government contractors are stuck inside the International Zone, also known as “the Green Zone,” in Central Baghdad. Even travel inside that walled enclave is somewhat restricted.
Pajamas Media is the first to report that the CIA station is all but motionless–as meetings with informants and Iraqi government officials have been hastily cancelled.
So that’s the angle we’ll be hearing about for the next few news cycles: if you don’t let America keep its barely tame PMC killers in-country, then you hate our troops, because of you we won’t be able to bring them home. You hate America because you won’t let our diplomats get the protection they need to do their “diplomatic surge” job. You’re a horrible person.
Think I’m overplaying? Those accusations will be leveled at our Iraqi allies.
Commenting on this, Matt Yglesias opines, “I don’t think one need necessarily see this as an incredibly deliberate development.” It’s an accident, you see, that “has, increasingly, led our strategy to evolve in a divide and rule direction rather than a nation-building one.”
I beg to differ. This administration has no more intention of “nation-building” in Iraq than it has in Iran: in both cases, the “strategy” is nation destruction, which is, after all, what the military does best. Civilians build nations: soldiers tear them down. It’s elementary, my dear Watson, that our policy of fomenting civil war in Iraq is no “accident.” Iraq is useful to us for one reason and one reason only: as a launching pad for the next war.
That war won’t launch, however, with the Maliki government standing directly in its path, and so our former sock puppets will have to be ditched: that confrontation is coming. The Iraqis, however, would have to be brain-dead not to see this, so it looks to me like they’re about to pull off a preemptive strike: the expulsion of the Blackwater “private” security firm for alleged atrocities carried out against Iraqi civilians may be the first step, with the second step being a request from the Iraqis that the U.S. military follow in Blackwater’s wake (or, perhaps, just the threat of such a request).
Pat Buchanan posed the pertinent question some time ago when he asked: What do we do if and when the Iraqi government asks us to leave?
The answer is: depose them and install more compliant sock puppets, ones who don’t talk back (or bite the hand that manipulates them, to mix a metaphor). With Iyad Allawi, the CIA’s former fave rave, waiting in the wings, and the Lobby pushing furiously for a U.S. attack on Iran before Bush leaves office, the wheels of the Mesopotamian centrifuge are spinning faster and faster, and it won’t be long before the whole place comes apart at the seams…
Which suits the Americans just fine. A stable Iraq, with a more-or-less functional central government presided over by the Shi’ite majority, would not countenance an American attack on Iran or Syria. A country in chaos, however, has no choice but to stand by and watch.
And as usual, Justin Raimondo there has the truth of it. Long term, this could be the event used to tie Maliki’s Shi’a government to Shi’a Iran, and behind all this, Iran is still the heart of the issue. Time is growing short for Bush to hit Iran before he leaves office.
The Blackwater incident, and the Iraqi response to it, may be the excuse the Bushies have been looking for to get rid of Maliki and bring in Ayad Allawi (again), presumably in order to bless the US efforts in going after Iran. Getting Blackwater and the PMCs off the front pages of America and getting “Maliki in bed with Iran” stories on is the goal.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Because the more the PMC issue stays on the front pages of America, the more Bush’s private army of barely legal thugs looms over America’s psyche, the psyche of a country founded in opposition to this kind of treatment, then the more chance there is of a critical mass finally being reached.
The Blackwater incident is clearly far more significant than I originally thought, and it’s just now coming around how important it could be to America’s and Iraq’s future…and Iran’s.
Let’s not forget that in the end, our government unleashed these killers on Iraq.
Few people not employed by Blackwater know more about the rising world of private military companies than Robert Young Pelton, author of Licensed To Kill, an exploration of military contracting in the war on terrorism. Pelton told me it’s a mistake to point a finger at Blackwater for Sunday’s debacle in Mansour without looking at the role of the State Department — which, after all, pays Blackwater to protect its diplomats. State doesn’t want to take chances with its peoples’ lives in the chaos of Iraq.
Blackwater’s rules of engagement “are set by State and are different than other security contractors who use the Military Rules of Engagement and Rules of Force,” Pelton says via e-mail. “State went from a kinder, gentler Rules of Force (they were told to shoot flares, throw water bottles or wave a flag to warn off motorists) to shoot if a threat is imminent with no warning shots required. They are supposed to use aimed shots and have to file a report if there is any discharge of a weapon.” The State Department has said that Blackwater fired warning shots in Sunday’s Mansour attack at an approaching car.
As quoted by the New York Times, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that security companies in the department’s employ will, when under attack, “respond with graduated use of force, proportionate to the kind of fire and attack that they’re coming under.” The rules of engagement for contractors in Iraq are much less restrictive than those for the U.S. military. An ex-Legionnaire named Anthony Hunter-Choat, who used to supervise security for the Pentagon’s contracting office in Baghdad, created the first rules of engagement for Iraq security contractors. According to Pelton, Hunter-Choat said in 2003, “if they shoot, shoot back.”
That’s a standard that, so far, hasn’t been met with objections from the State Department. “Its important to note that [State Department] or Embassy security details work in close conjunction with the State Department security staff (Diplomatic Security Services) and the U.S. military, so it’s incorrect to portray Blackwater as a lone actor in all of this,” Pelton says.
Is there any wonder why the Iraqis are pissed off enough to finally tell us to take these guys out of the country now? Is there any real doubt as to the future plans for these PMC troops in regards to Iran? The PMC issue is a critical point here, and much more attention needs to be paid to it by progressives, because lord knows the other side is going to literally use it as a weapon. Any future wars launched from Iraq will include PMC mercs, because America won’t tolerate losses of our “brave men and women” in uniform. Paid mercs on the other hand? Not so much sympathy there if lost, not so much sympathy for them being there as part of our Army. Bush’s plans require them, but they require them being there under the radar. The Iraqis just blew their cover, even though they’ve been the 800-pound armed gorilla in the room for 4 years now. Make no mistake, Blackwater on the front page is a direct threat to Bush attacking Iran. Even more so is the Maliki government directly threatening the war plans by making a stink over Blackwater (as they have every right to do). They’re just puppets after all, not real people, right?
This just keeps getting worse, and it’s going to get a lot worse quickly.
