Seven Questions: The Hired Guns of Iraq

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Posted October 2007

Private military firm Blackwater is in hot water over a shooting incident that left more than a dozen Iraqis dead and prompted new congressional oversight in Washington. For this week’s Seven Questions, FP spoke with military expert Peter Singer about why even this tragedy won’t prompt Americans to stop outsourcing their wars. PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images See no evil: These guys may be the ones with their eyes blacked out, but it’s the American people who are in the dark about private military contractors. Foreign Policy: What do you make of the $136 million request by the Nuri al-Maliki government to compensate the victims of the Sept. 16 Blackwater shooting? Peter Singer: I don’t think it will be anywhere near that amount at the end of the day. This seems to be part of a broader effort to ramp up the pressure on not merely the company but also on the U.S. government. The monetary figure was less important than their announcement that, based on the fact that the company had not registered since 2006, it and its employees did not have any sort of immunity to Iraqi courts and that the Iraqi judicial system wanted to go after them. FP: Do you think this incident is a microcosm of some of the problems the Iraqi government is having in establishing effective institutions? PS: Well, you can look at this entire episode as a microcosm of what’s going wrong on both the Iraqi government’s side as well as the U.S. side. On one hand, you have an Iraqi [interior] ministry that’s considered fairly corrupt and fairly inept. On the flip side, you have an American mission that is so hollowed out that it’s reliant on forces outside the chain of command to carry out its operations. Our surge strategy has two elements to it: One, to restore stability and security to give the Iraqi government breathing space, and two, to press that government on its political benchmarks. This episode shows the hollowness of both efforts. On the military side of things, the same week that Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker are testifying to Congress about the progress made and President Bush makes a speech about how there’s a return to a sense of normalcy in Baghdad, you have 43 people shot by private military contractors in Baghdad alone; that kind of undercuts [their argument]. Then you get to the political side. Top of the agenda is no longer, “Prime minister, how can you solve this sectarian violence so we can get our troops out of there?” It’s Blackwater. FP: Couldn’t you argue that private security companies, with the proper oversight, are simply doing a job the American people have deemed necessary but aren’t willing to do themselves? PS: You could argue that, but I don’t think it would be a truthful argument. The overall percentage of press reports coming out of Iraq that mention contractors is a quarter of 1 percent. That’s a pretty telling point when you want to weigh in on whether the American people are really supporting this or not. Then you get to the second issue, which is that people in policy positions will often say things like, “We had no choice.” That’s either a straight-up lie, or it’s just a classic addict’s denial. You had choices. You chose not to make them because there were political costs that came with those choices. FP: When you really hear about contractors in the media is when they mess up. Do you think that the recent negative publicity about them is warranted? PS: It is definitely true that folks are focusing on negative public incidents. But there’s a second element to that, which is that there are a number of incidents over the past several years that simply haven’t been reported in the press. I spoke with one major TV outfit that witnessed a shooting of an unarmed civilian outside its compound. The reason they didn’t cover it is that they couldn’t get good interviews, because the companies would decline interviews. To me, that was utter B.S. If the media actually chose to report on the topic based on whether they could get good interviews or not, we wouldn’t have any stories about Osama bin Laden or Britney Spears, either. It was simply a shirking of their job. FP: Do you think that if you fix the accountability loophole of the private military industry, you’ve fixed the major problem with civilians in war zones? PS: There is no loophole. It is not that there’s this wide loophole that contractors can drive through. It’s rather that there are multiple laws that are sometimes in competition [with one another], be it local Iraqi civilian law, extraterritorial U.S. civilian law, or U.S. military law, all of which could apply to contractors. It’s the second element of this that’s critically important, the political will to actually use them, and that’s what has really been lacking. For example, the U.S. Congress recently passed what it believes to be an expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). I’m not a lawyer, but based on most folks’ interpretation of that law, [Congress] simply reinforced it. Seven Questions: The Hired Guns of Iraq Page 2 of 2 FP: You really don’t think that having this law on the books is really going to make much of difference? PS: Well, it’s Congress saying, “We want action.” It’s expressing its intent, but let’s get into some details. First, you have the issue of political will. Second, you have the question as to whether this extraterritorial application of civilian law is even applicable to all the situations that contractors might be involved in. When you get into situations, for example, the shooting in Nisour Square, then you’re talking about questions of battlefield conduct, whether they violated the rules of engagement or not. There are three issues there. First, for all the elements of the chain of evidence—witness depositions, witness testimony—it’s going to be very difficult to bring in other nationalities, but most importantly, other nationalities in the middle of a war zone. How do you convince them to come back, for example, to the New York district or wherever to testify? How do you maintain the chain of evidence over a vehicle that’s been shot up that’s in Baghdad? How do you bring it back to the United States? How do you even get a hold of it? All of those sorts of things. Two, you’re going to first have to educate a civilian jury on all the issues of what are really the laws of war. So you’re going to be saying, “Okay. First we’re going to teach you about these things called the rules of engagement, and there are a lot.” Third, there are a lot of things within the rules of engagement that are actually violations of civilian law. For example, driving your car down the wrong side of the road; shooting a flare at another vehicle to warn them away; firing your machine gun into the engine block to stop a vehicle; firing a round into the windshield to create a spider web to veer that vehicle away. In certain circumstances, all of these would not violate the rules of engagement. But you would be saying, “Hey civilian jury, ignore that part of it. We only want you to focus on whether they violated the last element of it.” What you’re really doing is asking this group of civilians to ignore some parts of civilian law and apply other parts of it that are inappropriate to a battlefield setting. So it isn’t that MEJA isn’t very useful to sorts of personal conduct—theft, assault, rape. Those are all things that have a parallel to civilian life and you can see a civilian jury being able to deal with them. But the battlefield conduct stuff just isn’t going to work, and that’s where the Uniform Code of Military Justice kicks in. But that law didn’t say anything about whether [private contractors] were working for DOD, or the State Department, or whatnot. The Pentagon never issued the guidance, and no one’s chosen to use it. FP: Much of the recent coverage around Blackwater has swirled around its ties to the Republican Party. Do you think the outrage would be lessened if some of the private security firms were more apolitical? PS: This incident was so public that it was unavoidable that there was going to be this much attention to it. What’s frustrating to me as an outsider is to see that the issue has become partisan, both because of the corporate actions but also because of a [polarized] political climate. The result, as you saw in the congressional hearings, is we turned an important issue of national security into something partisan, which means there’s almost no action—and that’s a sad statement. Peter Singer is senior fellow for foreign-policy studies and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institute. He is author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).