‘Outsourcing’ won’t solve our woes

WASHINGTON — Just when I think that this wonderful nation is beginning to shed some of the incoherence of the last six years, something new comes up and smacks me right in my ever-hopeful head.

Last week’s stunner came in the form of a headline-snatching proposal from the Defense Intelligence Agency to greatly enlarge the hiring of private contractors for core intelligence tasks. Thus we would be “outsourcing” larger percentages of America’s intelligence to God only knows whom, what or why.

The DIA announced calmly that it was preparing to pay $1 billion for men and women — who would not, remember, be under the direct control of the American government — to do much of our most sensitive intelligence work. This is work that aids in decisions to go to war, or support international bodies, or even torture prisoners in the name of democracy. This is work that historically has been considered, despite its specific “dirty” levels, as appropriately done only by American patriots.

Of course, there were always problems. It was certain of the “adventurers” in the CIA and the Congress, for instance, who were in large part responsible after the inconclusiveness of the Gulf War of 1991 for building up the pressure to “go into Iraq.” These were the ones who pushed for Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi opportunist and sometime patriot, to take over the country. And suddenly, there we were in Iraq, although Chalabi wasn’t, because large sectors of our military didn’t like him or his CIA cohorts.

All right, maybe I should have chosen a better example. So, take Gen. Douglas MacArthur, before he became the temporary “substitute emperor” of Japan, using our intelligence to take the advice of cultural anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict on the mentality of the people he had to reign over and win over.

At least through these periods, good and bad, we could know that our intelligence agents were part of an American system that oversaw them, judged them and could fire them. And that there was even a certain nobility about spying, when it came to one’s country’s security and future.

Now, hey, it’s “Anybody around here need a job?”

Growing like Topsy

The “outsourcing problem” has been growing like Topsy. The Washington Post reports that “Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department. ... Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks caught many of them unprepared to meet new demands with their existing workforce.”

The Post’s Walter Pincus reports that “Testimony at an April 2007 congressional hearing gave the impressive figure of 127,000 as the number working in Iraq under Defense Department contracts.” Why? Because, he notes, quoting the Congressional Research Service, doing otherwise would require policymakers “to contemplate an increase in the number of U.S. troops, perhaps increasing incentives to attract volunteers or re-instituting the draft.”

Pincus also notes that it is estimated that less than 20 percent of the contractors in Iraq are American. Think about that! Our entire “war machine” is being supported, albeit often at lower levels of work, by foreigners. But this opening to more private contractors in intelligence is the most dangerous turn of all; they can be foreign agents or even foreign sympathizers; they can be sensitive analysts or saboteurs; but what they will surely be are “intelligence agents” who do not fully belong to the United States. The “irregulars” of the insurgencies of the world are now having doors opened to them into the inner sanctums of American security, as we go from being a nation to virtually a company.

The more I have observed and covered American foreign policy, and the often excellent Americans who carry it through, the less I feel that we even need “intelligence agents” as we have known them. What we need are analysts who are a combination of historian, diplomat and foreign correspondent — people who, above all else, are out there on the ground where it is happening and who get the analysis right. Or they pay for getting it wrong, instead of being advanced for it!

They can and must be backed up by the U.S. military, of course, but the military should be confined to military purposes, not primarily to intelligence.

There is something else that we might think about. The major reason given for needing more contractors, agents, soldiers, fighters, special forces, and on and on, is that we have so many things to do in the world. By “things to do,” the spokesmen for this administration mean more military bases, troop movements, installations across the world (we’re in 80 countries right now) and huge, impenetrable embassies sitting apart from local peoples.

Would it not be possible to solve at least part of the problem by staying OUT of the quagmires we so readily fall into across the world?

Universal Press Syndicate