Outsourcing the Occupation

"Our men train military personnel, train pilots to land airplanes, escort food and supply convoys, and provide protection for Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority." Sound like an advertisement for the U.S. military? In fact, these are the words of a spokesman for Blackwater Security Consulting, a private security firm based in North Carolina, describing the role of his employees in the occupation of Iraq. It gives new meaning to the phrase "a private war."

Blackwater hit the headlines in late March 2004, when four Americans were killed, burned and dismembered in the turbulent northern town of Fallujah. Media reports described them as "civilian contractors" who were "protecting food shipments"; it later transpired that they were four of around 450 Blackwater employees on the ground in Iraq, who, along with other private firms, are playing a central role in the coalition's war effort.

The killings in Fallujah brought to the world's attention the mercenary phenomenon in Iraq. The coalition has contracted thousands of private military personnel from companies such as Blackwater, to do everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining key weapons systems, including M-1 tanks, Apache helicopters and B-2 stealth bombers, to providing armed protection to leading coalition officials. Such personnel are mostly ex-soldiers, from American, British, South African, European and other armies, who now make up to $1800 a day offering their skills and services to the private sector.

An estimated 15 to 20,000 of them are currently in Iraq -- and as one report points out, that is a greater number of men than provided by any other American ally, including Britain.

In some parts of Iraq, including the hostile Sunni triangle in the north, private military personnel have been at the forefront of the occupation. According to one report, they have become the most visible part of the occupation, often running high-risk operations that the American and British military would rather not do; and therefore, to some Iraqis, they have become "the most hated and humiliating aspect of the ... occupation."

Private personnel have borne the brunt of much of the Iraqi anger over the past two weeks. One report says "the ubiquity of heavily armed foreigners partly explains why so many people are being kidnapped in Iraq;" many of the "civilians" killed and kidnapped in hostile towns such as Fallujah in the north and Najaf in the south in the past 10 days have been private military personnel.

Why has the coalition contracted a private army of ex-soldiers, in the pay of profit-making security firms, to execute aspects of the occupation? Why is it increasingly relying on private guards, who are not subject to the coalition's chain of command and who can up and leave whenever they please?

Some claim the coalition is intensifying the occupation, creating a fearsome vanguard of toughs from around the globe; others that it is "privatizing the war" in order to make up numbers on the ground -- both the U.S. and British armies have shrunk over the past 10 years and are currently stretched, from Haiti to Afghanistan to the Philippines. Some on the American left argue that the rise of a private military complex shows the "jobs for the boys" mentality of the Bush administration, which is providing security contracts to "politically connected" firms.

These considerations may have impacted on the nature and number of private military personnel in Iraq. But fundamentally, the use of private firms in the war and occupation points to problems within the coalition. By outsourcing the occupation, the coalition is trying to distance itself from the political consequences of its actions, in effect creating a buffer between its war and what happens as a result.