Blackwater: Friend or Foe?

The National Review recently ran an article by Mario Loyola which recommends that Blackwater and the other PMC should leave Iraq.

The US Army follows strict rules of engagement, with soldiers often fighting against their survival instincts, refusing to return fire when fired upon if they cannot positively “ID” the shooter.

Security contractors like Blackwater are heavily armed, and act for their own protection — not for winning the war. The COIN [counterinsurgency] strategy doesn’t apply to them. This is resulting in a situation where perhaps 25% of the perceived coalition "force" is operating outside the chain of command, and in violation of the stated strategy.

Our soldiers are exercising deadly restraint to win over the population — and all of their work can unravel because of just one shooting incident carried out by private contractors. The resulting effect is an increase in risks for the US Military.

Not all private contractors are negligent - indeed some are very professional outfits - but Blackwater has a particularly bad reputation in the PMC community. Here is a short clip about Blackwater:



You can read an account of the life of a Baghdad PMC in John Geddes' excellent Book "Highway To Hell".

Iraq: President Bush asks for extra $46,000,000,000

Yesterday, President Bush requested an additional $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If approved, the President's request would bring the yearly budget for the wars there to an all-time high of $196 billion. "Iraq now consumes almost twice as much funding as is allocated for homeland security, diplomacy, and international assistance combined," according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.



The war in Iraq continues to balloon not only in yearly cost, but also in length. Gen. David Petraeus said recently that "historically counterinsurgency operations [like Iraq] have gone nine or 10 years."

With that scenario, the Center for American Progress estimates the total cost of the war in Iraq to be between $1.1 and $1.5 trillion. Including Afghanistan, the cost of U.S. wars waged overseas since Sept. 11, 2001, has already exceeded $806 billion. That total is more than what the United States spent in the Vietnam, Korean, or Gulf Wars.

Currently, only 26 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling the war in Iraq.

Dirty Sanchez and the Nightmare With No End...

I read yesterday in the New York Times that General Ricardo Sanchez made "a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq. The former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight."



“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

General Sanchez said he was convinced that the American effort in Iraq was failing the day after he took command, in June 2003. Asked why he waited until nearly a year after his retirement to voice his concerns publicly, he responded that it was not the place of active-duty officers to challenge lawful orders from the civilian authorities.