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Today's Must Read
Could the U.S. ultimately end up privatizing its entire mission in Iraq?
That's what the latest round of contracts the U.S. government plans to let out in the coming months might suggest.
As Walter Pincus reports in today's Washington Post, the new contracts underscore the non-military involvement the U.S. is undertaking as public pressure mounts to reduce troop numbers
One contract could essentially begin to privatize the process of training the Iraqi security forces by hiring "mentors" to do what the U.S. military has struggled unsuccessfully to do for the past five years.
The proposals reflect multiyear commitments. The mentor contract notes that the U.S. military "desires for both Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense to become mostly self-sufficient within two years," a time outside some proposals for U.S. combat troop withdrawal. ... The mentors will assist an U.S. military group that previously began to implement what are described as "core processes and systems," such as procurement, contracting, force development, management and budgeting, and public affairs.
On the civilian side, the Bush administration is looking for a team of contractors to establish a system of security and protection for the Iraq judicial system:
The marshals service would be organized by the State Department's bureau responsible for developing rule of law programs in Iraq. It "has plans to create an Iraqi service to be known as the Judicial Protection Service (JPS), modeled to some degree after the U.S. Marshals Service, that will ensure the safe conduct of judicial proceedings and protect judges, witnesses, court staff, and court facilities," a notice published last month said.
With a circular logic, the contractors for the court police will be primarily charged with setting up a system that can be run by contractors for the long term:
In short, State wants a contractor to put together all the elements so the department can contract the project to another contractor.
Finally, the U.S. is seeking to privatize its own Iraqi prisons.
Another contract noticed last week previews the opening, apparently in September, of a U.S.-run prison, now labeled a Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center, which is to be located at Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. The new contract calls for providing food for "up to 5,000 detainees" and will also cover 150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility. The contract is to run for one year, with an option year to follow.
These latest contract announcements come in addition to the massive amount of U.S. arms that the Pentagon has encouraged the Iraq military to buy.
So far, the Iraqi government -- which long relied on Russian-made military supplies -- has committed to buy about $3 billion in U.S. weapons, as USA Today reported recently:
The increase in Iraqi arms and equipment purchases has helped makers of such U.S. military staples as the Humvee, the Pentagon's workhorse vehicle, and the M-4 and M-16 rifles, military contract records show.That puts Iraq among the top current purchasers of U.S. military equipment through the foreign military sales program, records show. Benkert said the deals are helping to cement the future relationship of Iraq to the United States.
Its the gift that keeps on giving.
June 2, 2008 11:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Congress needs to stop the DoD from contracting out our military responsibilities. The U.S. should never be employing mercenaries. If we need a larger number of armed soldiers, then that should be acknowledged and authorized.
Contracting out the military is not "doing it on the cheap". It's much more expensive and there is little if any accountability.
In fact, much too much of our entire government is contracted out. The pendulum has swung as far as it should towards outsourcing in the government. We need more compentent government employees - not contractors.
I put forth this argument at the risk of my own job because I am a government contractor. I often cringe at the decisions I've made that directly effect policy, yet I'm not at all accountable for having done so. My company gets paid; I get paid. The offices I've supported don't have the resources to be able to make those policy decisions on their own. It's a mess. I count myself as one who cares what goes on in government more than the bottom line of my firm. I'm one of the few.
June 2, 2008 11:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Further proof that corporations are taking over the world. Bush had one plan when he took his oath of office- to make himself and his corporate friends rich. Need proof? Ya got it right here.
This is sick and wrong on so many levels.
June 2, 2008 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Blackwater Worldwide, the armed wing of the Republican Party; the Republican Party, the political wing of Blackwater Worldwide.
June 2, 2008 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh please. You think that even if the Iraq war ends Democrats will curtail any spending on contractor resources in Afghanistan? I'm not saying the contractor issue isn't a legitimate concern but there are almost as many contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan as there are official US military personnel. This has been the case from the beginning and will continue to be the case into the future and anybody who thinks the Democrats will really do anything to change that landscape in any significant way is just dreaming.
June 2, 2008 12:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
HateTheGame,
If the Democratic Party were to win both the White House and a legislative coalition I would hope and advocate to the best of my ability that it would do everything possible to restore the oversight capacty of our government regulatory agencies and to restore the public sphere overall -- including our military, and with foreign policy assistance from an improved relationship with our allies.
In sum, reverse the overall privatization and deregulatory trends in every phase of our civil society, of which the growing dependence upon security contractors is just one malignant aspect. Hezbollah ("Party of God") is a bad model for political partisanship in the premier democracy that ours is intended to be:
June 2, 2008 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Brought to you by Praetorian Guard, the fantastic new feeling of security foreign places . . . And our new product, Domestic Guard; for when things get sticky at home . . .
June 2, 2008 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Contracts will survive the change in administration, binding the US to Bush's current policy and enriching the Bush crony team long after Bush has left Washington. This is a set of unreviewable treaties. It's what happens when impeachment is taken off the table.
June 2, 2008 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's called slavery.
June 2, 2008 12:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
and what happens to these assholes when President Barack Obama refuses to sign the check ???
guess they can negotiate with the Iraqis for their just rewards
come on, they're fucking mercenaries
when they show up to get paid, you're supposed to shoot them in the head
do I really have to splain how this works ???
June 2, 2008 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
June 3, 2008 1:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
comment redo with fixed code:
Where did you get the impression that he might be doing that?
Obama's Mercenary Position, By Jeremy Scahill, March 17, 2008 edition of The Nation.
June 3, 2008 1:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I see they only buried Pincus on page A11.
Used to be A17. He's moving up in the world. By the time he retures, they may be printing his stories on A7, and the occasional WaPo print edition reader might actually see his stuff once in awhile.
June 2, 2008 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Will an election put an end to this colonialist "experiment"?
If so, then there won't be an election.
If not, then we will continue to ignore the neocon coup and all the subsequent crimes committed by the Bush regime.
June 2, 2008 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
If there's no SOF agreement they will be subject to Iraqi law.
June 2, 2008 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mercenary, Inc.
June 2, 2008 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Privateers? Fantastic! This is just what our Nation needs. Public funds utilized to fuel the tip of the spear. Public funds used to decimate a sovereign country's infrastructure. Public funds used to finance the 'diplomatic' cadre who craft the language of enslavement. Public funds used to transition the bundle over to private control. Public funds used to subsidize the mercenary contingent exercising control of that sovereign country's destiny. Private corporations reaping the benefits of all this chaos. These are the obviators and re-terraformers and the political ploys being used by the corporatocracy to usurp control of this country, by emptying our pockets and our treasury; and to take control of the rest of the World's resources in order to perpetuate their social imbalance. From the Many . . . For the Few. It's boggling to me, what I see our citizenry sitting still for. Do we well and truly deserve to fit ourselves for our chains?
June 2, 2008 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sir Francis Drake would be proud of his privateering legacy!
June 2, 2008 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is just one piece of the puzzle. The Rethugs would love to privatize the entire federal government. That way, their friends and cronies could get even more fabulously wealthy, and the rest of us could suffer more Katrina-like failures of will and competence.
June 2, 2008 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep, the scam is called the Bust-Out and Bu$hco is even better at it than the Sopranos!
http://theopinionmill.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/the-bush-bust-out-contd/
June 2, 2008 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
How those people proved able to muddle through thousands of years on their own, without any input from Great Britain or the United States, will remain an unfathomable mystery. Boy, did they luck out when we decided to lend them a hand.
June 2, 2008 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, creating civilization, inventing law, codifying architecture; whatever would they do without us?
June 2, 2008 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you read the history of Iraq from the twentieth century onward, nothing has been done by the Western world involving Iraq that was done for any reason other than money. This "trend" continues. The neocons have never had any intention of ending the fiasco in Iraq until they are out of office. Now they are setting up their golden parachutes.
The right thing for President Obama to do on taking office is to cancel all contracts entered into by the Bush administration in the past two years. Allow a two month transition period, then the contracts are null and void.
June 2, 2008 1:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hear! Hear!
June 2, 2008 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Remember the republicans saying, "Government needs to be run more like a business"?
As a vet, nothing galls me more, than to listen to a military contractor (theoretically doing the same job as our troops) moaning and groaning about missing his family, when he is making 5 times the pay of our troops (usually tax free). When his contract elaspes, he has the choice to either sign-on again, or go home. Our troops have the choice of "Stop Loss" or Ft. Levenworth.
June 2, 2008 1:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Could the U.S. ultimately end up privatizing its entire mission in Iraq?
Why not, but just so everyone understands - ExxonMobil may not always be a "Western contractor" - because todays Western contractor really has only one allegiance and that is not the allegiance of democracy but rather the allegiance of money. With the Euro being so much more valued over the American dollar, who would blame Western contractors for developing into a European or Russian held majority. Will ExxonMobil sell out to LUKOIL?
Think it can happen - what about BP?
TNK-BP is a leading Russian oil company and is among the top ten privately-owned oil companies in the world in terms of crude oil production. The company was formed in 2003 as a result of the merger of BP’s Russian oil and gas assets and the oil and gas assets of Alfa, Access/Renova group (AAR). BP and AAR each own 50% of TNK-BP. The shareholders of TNK-BP also own close to 50% of Slavneft, a vertically integrated Russian oil company.
Oh those damn communist oil companies. Whatever would Joseph McCarthy say?
ExxonMobil doesn't care if they are selling to China or the US and Bush isn't going to make the care.
June 2, 2008 2:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's called fascism. It is way past time for it to be called exactly what it is, and for the people who promote it to be named exactly for what they are.
June 2, 2008 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
opps should have been: Think it can't happen.
Free trade, sometimes Americans need to look at how well it DOESN'T work.
June 2, 2008 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
It kind of makes you wonder how companies like Ford and Chevy, (GM) plan on marketing to a world of people less and less able to afford the product?
Henry Ford WANTED a product that most American could afford but all those people losing their homes will not have good credit - can't afford anything on Chevy or Fords car lots?
Perhaps it's time for new companies with vision - perhaps it's time for something other than the combustible engine - but God knows that Ford and Chevy NEVER wanted to move beyond fossil fuel dependency and those companies passionately HATED anything congress would pass regarding fuel efficiency as much as they hated their union workers - I mean, WHY did they trash the electic car? Chevy and Ford canot really sell their vehicles to foreign nations - they are not global and never intended to be - to big and uses too much gas is off the list. Henry Ford would have gone back to drawing board - but his descendants don’t know how to stop kissing ExxonMobil’s royal behind.
June 2, 2008 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wish someone would remind the MSM that the reason the Sunnis are so quiet is that we're paying them cash to be part of the Awakening Councils and chase AQI.
What's going to happen when we stop paying them?
June 2, 2008 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
The minute the dollars stop the guns come out. The sunni faction has run the government of Iraq, or Bahgdad or Messopotamia for hundreds of years, shiites have never had it, let alone kurds. So when they find they are no longer being paid from government coffers, they will fight. Frankly, if the new Shiite government is smart, they will pay and co-opt the sunni the way America is now. Frankly it seems like the only politically stable solution short of ethnic warfare, massacre and displacement.
June 2, 2008 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink