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2 All power to US's shadow army in
Iraq By Jeremy Scahill
The Democratic leadership in the US
Congress is once again gearing up for a great
sellout on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over
the US$124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill
is being headlined in the media as a "showdown" or
"war" with the White House, it is hardly that. In
plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of
the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats
to power last November, the congressional
leadership has made clear its intention to keep
funding the Iraq occupation, even
though
Senator Harry Reid has declared that "this war is
lost".
For months, the Democrats'
"withdrawal" plan has come under fire from
opponents of the occupation who say it doesn't
stop the war, doesn't de-fund it, and ensures that
tens of thousands of US troops will remain in Iraq
beyond President George W Bush's second term. Such
concerns were reinforced by Senator Barack Obama's
recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut
off funding for the war, regardless of the
president's policies. "Nobody," he said, "wants to
play chicken with our troops."
The New
York Times reported, "Lawmakers said they expect
that Congress and Mr Bush would eventually agree
on a spending measure without the specific
timetable" for (partial) withdrawal, which the
White House has said would "guarantee defeat". In
other words, the appearance of a fierce debate,
presidential veto and all, has largely been a show
with a predictable outcome.
The shadow
war in Iraq While all of this is
troubling, there is another disturbing fact that
speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of
insight into the nature of this unpopular war -
and most Americans will know next to nothing about
it. Even if the president didn't intend to veto
their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost
nothing to address the second-largest force in
Iraq - and it's not the British military. It's the
estimated 126,000 private military "contractors"
who will stay put there as long as Congress
continues funding the war.
The 145,000
active-duty US forces are nearly matched by
occupation personnel who currently come from such
companies as Blackwater USA and the former
Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close
personal and political ties with the Bush
administration. Until Congress reins in these
massive corporate forces and the whopping federal
funding that goes into their coffers, partially
withdrawing US troops may only set the stage for
the increased use of private military companies
(and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from
any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
From the beginning, these contractors have
been a major hidden story of the war, almost
uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely
central to maintaining the US occupation of Iraq.
While many of them perform logistical support
activities for US troops, including the sort of
laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and
food-preparation work that once was performed by
soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly
engaged in military and combat activities.
According to the Government Accountability
Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of
private military companies in Iraq. These
not-quite GI Joes working for Blackwater and other
major US firms can clear in a month what some
active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got
126,000 contractors over there, some of them
making more than the secretary of defense," said
the chairman of the House of Representatives'
Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, John Murtha.
"How in the hell do you justify that?" House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman
Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in
taxpayers' money has so far been spent in Iraq on
armed "security" companies such as Blackwater -
with tens of billions more going to other war
companies such as KBR and Fluor for "logistical"
support. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence
Committee believes that up to 40 cents of every
dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war
contractors.
With such massive government
payouts, there is little incentive for these
companies to minimize their footprint in the
region and every incentive to look for more
opportunities to profit - especially if, sooner or
later, the "official" US presence shrinks, giving
the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding
down of the war.
Even if Bush were to sign
the legislation the Democrats have passed, their
plan "allows the president the leeway to escalate
the use of military security contractors directly
on the battlefield", Erik Leaver of the Institute
for Policy Studies pointed out. It would "allow
the president to continue the war using a
mercenary army". The crucial role of
contractors in continuing the occupation was
driven home in January when David Petraeus, the
general running Bush's "surge" plan in Baghdad,
cited private forces as essential to winning the
war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate,
he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to
insufficient troop levels available to an
overstretched military.
Along with Bush's
official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of
contract security forces", Petraeus told the
senators, "give me the reason to believe that we
can accomplish the mission". Indeed, Petraeus
admitted that he has at times not been guarded in
Iraq by the US military, but "secured by contract
security".
Such widespread use of
contractors, especially in mission-critical
operations, should have raised red flags among
lawmakers. After a recent trip to Iraq, retired
General Barry McCaffery observed bluntly, "We are
overly dependant on civilian contractors. In
extreme danger - they will not fight." It is,
however, the political rather than military uses
of these forces that should be cause for the
greatest concern.
Contractors have
provided the White House with political cover,
allowing for a back-door near-doubling of US
forces in Iraq through the private sector, while
masking the full extent of the human costs of the
occupation.
Although contractor deaths are
not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors
have been killed in Iraq and at least another
7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in
any official (or media) toll of the war. More
significant, there is absolutely no effective
system of oversight or accountability governing
contractors and their operations, nor is there any
effective law - military or civilian - being
applied to their activities.
They have not
been subjected to military courts-martial (despite
a recent congressional attempt to place them under
the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have
they been prosecuted in US civilian courts - and,
no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be
prosecuted in Iraqi courts.
Before L Paul
Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in
2004, he issued an edict known as Order 17. It
immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq,
which today is like the wild west, full of roaming
Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable,
heavily armed mercenaries, ex-military men from
around the world, working for the occupation. For
the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and
impunity are welded together.
Despite the
tens of thousands of contractors passing through
Iraq and several well-documented incidents
involving alleged contractor abuses, only two
individuals have been ever indicted for crimes
there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow
contractor, while the other pleaded guilty to the
possession of child-pornography images on his
computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of
American soldiers have been court-martialed - 64
on murder-related charges - not a single armed
contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against
an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were
alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly
incidents, their companies whisked them out of
Iraq to safety.
One armed contractor
recently informed the Washington Post, "We were
always told, from the very beginning, if for some
reason something happened and the Iraqis were
trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the
back of a car and sneak you out of the country in
the middle of the night." According to another, US
contractors in Iraq had their own motto: "What
happens here today stays here today."
Funding the mercenary war
"These private contractors are really an
arm of the administration and its policies,"
argued Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has called
for a withdrawal of all US contractors from Iraq.
"They
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