Hillary Clinton recently announced that, if elected, she would “ask the Joint Chiefs for their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors with the goal of ultimately implementing a ban on such contractors,”. When this first came across my RSS reader I thought it was great and intended to give Hillary credit for getting out front on the issue. Unfortunately, and as usual with Hillary, there’s more to the story.
Although she’s attacked Obama for not taking a similar position, in fact Obama introduced anti-mercenary legislation before the incident in Fallujah. Obama’s legislation would have subjected the mercenaries to U.S. criminal law, which sounds good at first blush, but may in fact provide helpful PR cover for the companies supplying the mercenaries without really curbing any abuses:
In February 2007, Obama introduced contractor reform and oversight legislation that has become the Democrats’ major plan in the Congress. Obama’s bill seeks to make all contractors subject to prosecution in US civilian courts for crimes committed on a foreign battlefield. The bill is not without its problems. In theory, FBI investigators would deploy to the crime scene, gather evidence and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions.
Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively police such an enormous deployment of private contractors (at present basically equal to the number of active duty US troops in Iraq), the legislation would give the private military industry a tremendous PR victory. The companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations, yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce. Perhaps that is why the industry has passionately backed this approach.
The problem, according to Jeffrey Scahill of the Nation, from whose article these facts are gleaned, is that both Hillary and Obama must rely on mercenaries to protect the thousands of people they both intend to leave in Iraq, should they ever really substantially withdraw troops. So both of them will be forced to leave a huge contingent of largely uncontrolled armed thugs in the country. That ought to win a lot of hearts and minds.
Neither Obama or Clinton are willing to consider the obvious solution of a truly complete withdrawal from Iraq. They are both willing to allow George Bush to bequeath a permanent Middle East headache to them and to this country. They either truly believe we should try to maintain our imperial sway, or are afraid to risk the wrath of the neo-cons, who got us into this mess in the first place. I’m not sure which of those is worse.
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