Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Take Blackwater down
By Haley Paul
Daily Evergreen (Washington State U.)
09/24/2007

(U-WIRE) PULLMAN, Wash. — Something has finally happened in Iraq that could, just maybe, unify the Iraqi people.

An assertive demand from the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is attracting a lot of attention to a generally undercover enterprise: American private security forces in Iraq, contracted by the U.S. government. Suddenly, kicking these private companies out of the country, or at the very least, getting them under some semblance of the law is one issue that Iraqis might agree with each other on.

The trouble that now ensnares Blackwater USA because of the alleged shooting and killing of eight Iraqi civilians is not an isolated affair. According to The New York Times, the prime minister claims there are seven other cases in which Iraqi civilians have lost their lives at the hands of the company.

It is strange that in Iraq — a country that the United States invaded in 2003 — privately contracted soldiers are now doing much of the work that the U.S. military would normally do. Why the need for private contractors? Perhaps there are not enough military bodies to do the job, and a super-surge or a draft would have to happen in the United States to fill in the niche that the tens of thousands of privately-contracted workers currently occupy. Maybe we use the private sector in a very public war because it takes the burden of protecting outsiders off of the military, allowing them to direct their efforts elsewhere.

Regardless, privately contracted security forces are in Iraq and do a lot of the work that the U.S. military does not have the resources to do. For a period of time, it seemed the system was working. yet now these reports of Iraqi civilians being killed by an American private company emerge.

According to The New York Times, early in the war the U.S. government exempted private sector enterprises from Iraqi law, and the subsequent inaction of the Pentagon and Department of Defense to change this once the Iraqi people voted for their own constitution has created a sticky situation. It is unnerving to think that highly trained security company employees — often ex-military personnel making significantly more money in the private sector than they would in the military — are roaming around Iraq with relatively few restrictions and laws to abide by.

The use of private companies in Iraq may be news to many Americans, but delve deeper and we will find that private security forces are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of non-government personnel working in Iraq and other U.S. military conflict zones. According to Mother Jones Magazine, at least half of the estimated $40 billion that the U.S. spent on intelligence in 2005 went to the private sector. Some might consider this outsourcing to be the free-enterprise system at its best.

Nonetheless, it is a clandestine way of keeping the actual events that unfold in war and conflict zones under wraps from the American public.

Since 2001, the Bush administration has significantly increased the use of the private sector to do normally government-run jobs. Efficiency might be a net result, but at what cost? It is important that the government be held accountable for its actions, and if they are utilizing private companies to do the jobs they once did, it is harder to make the government own up.

As exemplified in the case of Blackwater USA, companies are not subjected to the consequences that a national government might be, and we should be weary and watchful, lest our entire government be run by the companies that lobbied the hardest.

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