Wes Clark said those words on the campaign trail in 2003. He was talking about the outsourcing of some combat operations to private companies.
It struck a cord with me but didn’t get a lot of press. The CorpPress were in “ignore stance” as far as a the Clark campaign was concerned, but more than that, I don’t think they saw a problem with outsourcing any government function. They bought into the whole right wing meme that private enterprise does a better job.
Since then, the Press have had a rude awakening. It looks like they finally got it with the Walter Reed scandal, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The whole idea of replacing government functions with private companies, which has been the GOP’s raison d’être from the beginning, has proven to be disastrous. And may I say, it comes a no surprise to most of us.
Private companies have a whole different mission from government. Their bottom line is to make a profit……service be damned.
But back to what Clark was talking about………combat troops!
Jeremy Scahill has written an expose called Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I confess I have not read it but he has adapted some of it for The Nation which should be a must read for anyone who cares about our democracy. The very title of the article Bush’s Shadow Army, sends shivers down my spine.
Some snippets….
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq–an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a “road map for change” at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the “Department’s Total Force” as “its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors–constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.” This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors–conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. “We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren’t being counted, and the danger is that there’s zero accountability,” says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
Luckily, the newly installed Democratic Congress appears to be aware of the problem…
Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors.
One of the worst…..
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company’s success represents the realization of the life’s work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration’s war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission…
But wait, there’s more…
While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration’s Praetorian Guard…
Say it ain’t so, Bill…..
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the “war on terror” that the company’s glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war…..
This company has truly become Bush’s “Praetorian Guard”….from Iraq to Afghanistan to Katrina and on and on………
Read the whole thing. It’ll set you’re hair on fire!
One hopes that Congress will do it’s part in drawing back the veil of secrecy surrounding this atrocity, but we need more. We need someone in the White House who has a desire to reverse the head long rush into the privatization of our military (not to mention every other aspect of the government). Someone who owes nothing to companies who consistently put their own bottom line before the good of the country…….not the least, the MIC.
Wes Clark knows where the bodies are buried at the Pentagon. He has talked in the past about the danger of the Military Industrial Complex and unlike most retired Generals, he refused to work for a defense contractor upon retirement from active service. And of course, he has never been in a position where he’s had to accept political donations from MIC lobbyists…or any other lobbyists for that matter.
He, and he alone, has the skills, know-how, guts, and yes Leadership, to change this culture.
Jump in, General, the water is fine!