That Other Iraq War Surge

I be a bad ass hired gun getting rich off of da war.

Let’s be cynical for a moment by suggesting that one of the reasons Iraq has become a Forever War is the billions and billions of dollars being made from it not just by stateside defense contractors, but all of the camp-follower companies that now have more employees in the war zone than there are U.S. soldiers.

Perhaps that’s not cynical at all, but an unpleasant conclusion that is reinforced by three inter-related realities:

* There never were remotely enough troops to do the job in Iraq, which is why civilians are performing many tasks that traditionally are the purview of the uniformed services. These civilians include out-and-out armed American mercenaries who are paid many times more than enlisted men and officers.

* If there’s money to be made from misery, American contractors will muscle their way to the front of the line.

* Shock of shocks, many of those contractors are hard-wired to the Bush administration through sweetheart deals awarded on the basis of their loyalty to the Republican Party and campaign fundraising largess.

The Los Angeles Times weighed in earlier this week with an eye-opening piece stating that an extraordinary 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts.

That includes 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis, but does not include the armed mercenaries that provide security for VIPs, military convoys and U.S. facilities, many of whom are former Special Forces and Navy SEALs.

Says Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting:

"These numbers are big. They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing."

And William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert:

"We don't have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That's dangerous for our country. [The Pentagon] is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that's obscene."

The Pentagon says that contractors cut costs while allowing troops to focus on fighting rather than on other tasks. But that can be problematic when, for example, they refuse to make deliveries of vital supplies under fire, which has happened.

The Times found that the companies with the largest number of employees in Iraq are headquartered in the Middle East and subcontract to KBR, the Houston-based oil services company that was once a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.

Yup, Halliburton. The company that was led by Dick Cheney until he became vice president.

Click here and here for previous posts on the mercenary issue.