Today’s Must ReadFor two years, military officials, defense experts, lawyers and Iraqi officials tried to warn the U.S. against relying so heavily on unaccountable private security contractors in Iraq. Until Blackwater’s fateful September shooting at Nisour Square, the U.S. answer was always the same: meh. One reason the Pentagon didn’t care: one of its chief advisers on security contractors was on the contractors’ payroll.
Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post — who’s dogged Blackwater ever since the shooting — delivers a taxonomy of unheeded warnings. The pattern is fairly simple, and rather Blackwater-specific. (The Blackwater brand has become a generic signifier for security contractors in Iraq — the Q-Tip or Kleenex of contract security.) Blackwater’s guards shoot someone. People complain. They warn that impunity for security contractors jeopardizes the U.S. mission. U.S. officials do nothing. Nothing changes. More Iraqis get shot. Repeat. T.X. Hammes, a top-shelf counterinsurgency expert and ex-adviser to the Iraqi army training mission, told Fainaru, “I still think, from a pure counterinsurgency standpoint, armed contractors are an inherently bad idea, because you cannot control the quality, you cannot control the action on the ground, but you’re held responsible for everything they do.”
So why did it take widespread Iraqi outrage over the Nisour Square debacle for anything to change? One reason, Fainaru reports, is a man named Lawrence W. Peter. The Pentagon allowed the security contractors to regulate and police themselves. Peter, a Pentagon consultant, helped keep it that way. Only while he delivered that advice, he worked for a security contractors’ lobby.
U.S. officials often turned to the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, a trade group funded by the security companies. Lawrence T. Peter, a retired Navy intelligence officer, served as the association’s director while also working as a consultant to the Pentagon’s Defense Reconstruction Support Office, which administers contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman, said Peter earned “a few thousand dollars a year” as a consultant.The association operated out of an office inside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Logistics Directorate in the Green Zone. Jack Holly, a retired Marine colonel who heads corps logistics in Iraq, said that Peter and the association play “a critical role to help the private security community improve and regulate itself,” adding, “They tried to fill a void that had been left by the U.S. government’s failure to recognize the problem.”
To the Pentagon, Peter didn’t have any conflicting interests, according to spokesman Bryan Whitman:
“The department didn’t see him as an advocate” for the security industry, Whitman said, referring to Peter. “They saw him as a conduit for information to understand the role of private security contractors in the reconstruction process.”
A cynic might observe that that’s exactly the problem. And that problem has done significant damage to the U.S. mission in Iraq. Not surprisingly, some U.S. officials in Baghdad don’t have a lot of love for the company.
“They’re universally despised in the” Green Zone, said [Michael J.] Arrighi, who has managed security for several companies since 2004. “That’s not an overstatement. ‘Universally despised’ is probably a kind way to put it.”
So this t-shirt probably isn’t in his Christmas stocking.