Monday, July 21, 2003
Iraq and more Iraq. Even the death by suicide of a British scientist in the news today is Iraq related.
A thought provoking article by William Saffire on the NYT is also Iraq related:
Saddam's Guerrillas
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON
Saddam Hussein is waging "a classical guerrilla-type campaign," says Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command, which is "getting more organized" every day.
What can the deposed dictator hope to accomplish? How can he, with a ragtag force of Baathist criminals and imported killers with nothing to lose, possibly defeat 170,000 occupying troops?
Saddam outfoxed one President Bush and intends to outfox and outlast another. Facing the likelihood that his army would disintegrate under direct assault, he probably decided that the mother of all battles against a democracy is a war of attrition. We may assume his current strategy to be based on some of these assumptions:
1. Troop losses drove Clinton out of Somalia, Eisenhower out of Lebanon, Johnson and Nixon out of Vietnam. In occupied Iraq, only one death a day — sustained for months with pictures of bereaved families on television — would, in Saddam's thinking, not only demoralize the occupiers but also increase political pressure in the U.S. and Britain to bring the troops home.
2. European and Muslim opinion, incensed at being ignored by a superpower, will continue to deny cooperation to the victors. Saddam assumes this would force Bush to turn over control of Iraq to the U.N., in which Kofi Annan has just said "democracy should not be imposed from the outside," and the blue helmets would run at the first Sunni uprising.
3. Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam's victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of "quagmire."
4. Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam.
5. He presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.
6. Inside Iraq, with the Americans on the way out, the Shiite majority would split, and when the Sunni minority seizes power in Baghdad the troublesome Kurds would separate, thereby triggering a Turkish invasion of the north. In the ensuing anarchy, the strongman would emerge out of internal exile to exterminate the disloyal and lead the Arab world.
That's his comeback strategy. Is it a homicidal maniac's dream? If the taped voice is Saddam's, as we believe, it means he has worked out a means of secret production and clandestine transmission to cooperative broadcasters just as cunning as the concealment of damning documents or recent traffic across borders of money and terrorist helpers.
How best to deny Saddam's putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us?
Drop the premature conclusion that if we can't yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That's like saying because we haven't found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.
Put sacrifice in perspective. The loss of one soldier's life is individual tragedy, but the loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator would be national tragedy. The purpose of our armed forces is to protect us and that's the costly mission our volunteers carry out every day.
Remember which nations had the courage to do right in timely fashion. Dissenters are free to argue about judgments of hard-to-read intelligence, but few will deny that the world is indisputably safer with the overthrow of a proven mass murderer and financier of suicide bombers.
This above all: to end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein and his ghostly crew. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.
Also from the NYT, a column the contents of which I believe should be thoroughly discussed:
Have Guns, Will Travel
By P. W. SINGER
WASHINGTON
It is often said that war is too important to be left to the generals. But what about the C.E.O.'s? The Pentagon's plan to hire a private paramilitary force to guard sites in Iraq may have surprised many Americans, but it was really just another example of a remarkable recent development in warfare: the rise of a global trade in hired military services.
Known as "privatized military firms," these companies are the corporate evolution of old-fashioned mercenaries — that is, they provide the service side of war rather than weapons. They range from small consulting firms that offer the advice of retired generals to transnational corporations that lease out battalions of commandoes. There are hundreds of them, with a global revenue of more than $100 billion a year, operating in at least 50 countries.
Even the world's most dominant military has increasingly become reliant on them. From 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military firms. Companies like Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, now provide the logistics for every major American military deployment. Corporations have even taken over much of military training and recruiting, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at more than 200 American universities. (Yes, private employees now train our military leaders of tomorrow.)
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the industry's growing role than the campaign against Iraq. Private employees worked on everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining weapons systems like the B-2 bomber. Indeed, there was roughly one private military worker in the region for every 10 soldiers fighting the war (as opposed to one for every 100 troops in the 1991 gulf war).
And companies will play an even greater role in the occupation. In addition to the proposed security force, the new Iraqi military will be trained by corporate consultants. Washington has also contracted DynCorp, whose pilots have long helped the Pentagon destroy coca fields in Colombia, to train the new police force.
In many cases, privatizing war has allowed for greater military capacities and cost efficiency. A problem, however, is that while the industry has developed at a breakneck pace, governments and global bodies have responded at a bureaucratic crawl. There are almost no international laws or national regulations that have significant bearing on the industry.
This mix of profit motive with the fog of war raises several concerns. First, the good of private companies may not always be to the public good. All the normal worries one has with contractors (overcharging, overbilling hours, poorly trained workers, quality assurance) raise their ugly head; but in this case one is not dealing with a new plumber — lives are at stake. For example, a former DynCorp employee has accused the company of cutting costs by hiring former waiters and security guards to work as mechanics on Army helicopters.
Second, just like lawyers, some military contractors work only for ethical clients while others choose to make money from less savory types. As a result, some companies have helped save democratic regimes and aided humanitarian groups while others have supported dictators, rebel groups, drug cartels and terrorists.
In addition, foreign and military affairs are the government's domain. Undertaking public policy through private means can mean that some initiatives that might not pass public approval — such as the increasing American involvement, outside Congressional oversight, in Colombia's civil strife — still get carried out.
Also, privatized operations do not always go as planned. In 1998 the Colombian Air Force, working from intelligence supplied by an American company, mistakenly bombed a village, killing 17. In 2001 a plane carrying missionaries was shot down over Peru after private workers under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency alerted the Peruvian military that the plane seemed suspicious.
International and national laws must be updated so that governments gain some control over whom military firms are allowed to work with and can be certain the companies can be held accountable when things go wrong. Likewise, as governments come to rely more on private help, they must become more business-savvy, establishing good competition and oversight in their outsourcing. This is the only way to ensure that the public, not just the industry, enjoys the benefits of military privatization.
P.W. Singer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."
A thought provoking article by William Saffire on the NYT is also Iraq related:
Saddam's Guerrillas
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON
Saddam Hussein is waging "a classical guerrilla-type campaign," says Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command, which is "getting more organized" every day.
What can the deposed dictator hope to accomplish? How can he, with a ragtag force of Baathist criminals and imported killers with nothing to lose, possibly defeat 170,000 occupying troops?
Saddam outfoxed one President Bush and intends to outfox and outlast another. Facing the likelihood that his army would disintegrate under direct assault, he probably decided that the mother of all battles against a democracy is a war of attrition. We may assume his current strategy to be based on some of these assumptions:
1. Troop losses drove Clinton out of Somalia, Eisenhower out of Lebanon, Johnson and Nixon out of Vietnam. In occupied Iraq, only one death a day — sustained for months with pictures of bereaved families on television — would, in Saddam's thinking, not only demoralize the occupiers but also increase political pressure in the U.S. and Britain to bring the troops home.
2. European and Muslim opinion, incensed at being ignored by a superpower, will continue to deny cooperation to the victors. Saddam assumes this would force Bush to turn over control of Iraq to the U.N., in which Kofi Annan has just said "democracy should not be imposed from the outside," and the blue helmets would run at the first Sunni uprising.
3. Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam's victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of "quagmire."
4. Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam.
5. He presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.
6. Inside Iraq, with the Americans on the way out, the Shiite majority would split, and when the Sunni minority seizes power in Baghdad the troublesome Kurds would separate, thereby triggering a Turkish invasion of the north. In the ensuing anarchy, the strongman would emerge out of internal exile to exterminate the disloyal and lead the Arab world.
That's his comeback strategy. Is it a homicidal maniac's dream? If the taped voice is Saddam's, as we believe, it means he has worked out a means of secret production and clandestine transmission to cooperative broadcasters just as cunning as the concealment of damning documents or recent traffic across borders of money and terrorist helpers.
How best to deny Saddam's putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us?
Drop the premature conclusion that if we can't yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That's like saying because we haven't found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.
Put sacrifice in perspective. The loss of one soldier's life is individual tragedy, but the loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator would be national tragedy. The purpose of our armed forces is to protect us and that's the costly mission our volunteers carry out every day.
Remember which nations had the courage to do right in timely fashion. Dissenters are free to argue about judgments of hard-to-read intelligence, but few will deny that the world is indisputably safer with the overthrow of a proven mass murderer and financier of suicide bombers.
This above all: to end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein and his ghostly crew. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.
Also from the NYT, a column the contents of which I believe should be thoroughly discussed:
Have Guns, Will Travel
By P. W. SINGER
WASHINGTON
It is often said that war is too important to be left to the generals. But what about the C.E.O.'s? The Pentagon's plan to hire a private paramilitary force to guard sites in Iraq may have surprised many Americans, but it was really just another example of a remarkable recent development in warfare: the rise of a global trade in hired military services.
Known as "privatized military firms," these companies are the corporate evolution of old-fashioned mercenaries — that is, they provide the service side of war rather than weapons. They range from small consulting firms that offer the advice of retired generals to transnational corporations that lease out battalions of commandoes. There are hundreds of them, with a global revenue of more than $100 billion a year, operating in at least 50 countries.
Even the world's most dominant military has increasingly become reliant on them. From 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military firms. Companies like Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, now provide the logistics for every major American military deployment. Corporations have even taken over much of military training and recruiting, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at more than 200 American universities. (Yes, private employees now train our military leaders of tomorrow.)
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the industry's growing role than the campaign against Iraq. Private employees worked on everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining weapons systems like the B-2 bomber. Indeed, there was roughly one private military worker in the region for every 10 soldiers fighting the war (as opposed to one for every 100 troops in the 1991 gulf war).
And companies will play an even greater role in the occupation. In addition to the proposed security force, the new Iraqi military will be trained by corporate consultants. Washington has also contracted DynCorp, whose pilots have long helped the Pentagon destroy coca fields in Colombia, to train the new police force.
In many cases, privatizing war has allowed for greater military capacities and cost efficiency. A problem, however, is that while the industry has developed at a breakneck pace, governments and global bodies have responded at a bureaucratic crawl. There are almost no international laws or national regulations that have significant bearing on the industry.
This mix of profit motive with the fog of war raises several concerns. First, the good of private companies may not always be to the public good. All the normal worries one has with contractors (overcharging, overbilling hours, poorly trained workers, quality assurance) raise their ugly head; but in this case one is not dealing with a new plumber — lives are at stake. For example, a former DynCorp employee has accused the company of cutting costs by hiring former waiters and security guards to work as mechanics on Army helicopters.
Second, just like lawyers, some military contractors work only for ethical clients while others choose to make money from less savory types. As a result, some companies have helped save democratic regimes and aided humanitarian groups while others have supported dictators, rebel groups, drug cartels and terrorists.
In addition, foreign and military affairs are the government's domain. Undertaking public policy through private means can mean that some initiatives that might not pass public approval — such as the increasing American involvement, outside Congressional oversight, in Colombia's civil strife — still get carried out.
Also, privatized operations do not always go as planned. In 1998 the Colombian Air Force, working from intelligence supplied by an American company, mistakenly bombed a village, killing 17. In 2001 a plane carrying missionaries was shot down over Peru after private workers under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency alerted the Peruvian military that the plane seemed suspicious.
International and national laws must be updated so that governments gain some control over whom military firms are allowed to work with and can be certain the companies can be held accountable when things go wrong. Likewise, as governments come to rely more on private help, they must become more business-savvy, establishing good competition and oversight in their outsourcing. This is the only way to ensure that the public, not just the industry, enjoys the benefits of military privatization.
P.W. Singer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."
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