A war zone is a bad place to rely on private contractors

The extent to which the war in Iraq has been privatized should have raised alarm bells sooner. It was inevitable that heavily armed private contractors operating outside U.S., Iraqi and military law would be involved in a troublesome incident.

Actually, there already have been incidents, but they either got little attention, or they soon faded from view.

In one case, the private contractors were the victims. In 2004, a mob of insurgents ambushed a Blackwater security detail in Fallujah. Four Blackwater guards were killed and their bodies burned, the remains of two strung from a bridge.

The U.S. military’s unsuccessful assault on the city in retaliation for the guards’ deaths left an estimated 27 Marines and an unknown number of civilians dead.

That incident got enormous coverage at the time, but three years later is largely forgotten.

A case in which a Blackwater employee killed an Iraqi last Christmas got little attention in the United States, but has not been forgotten in Iraq. A Blackwater contractor challenged by a security guard for an Iraqi vice president in Baghdad opened fire on the Iraqi, killing him. The Blackwater employee fled to the U.S. Embassy and was flown out of the country. Blackwater says the employee has been fired and the company is cooperating with federal investigators.

Latest incident

Now, a confrontation between a Blackwater security detail and Iraqi civilians has left eight civilians dead. The Iraqi government says the dead are all innocents. Blackwater maintains that its employees, providing security for a diplomatic convoy, were under attack and reacted appropriately.

A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, could not say what Iraqi laws Blackwater or its employees might be subject to, the chain of command its employees answer to, or details of the company’s contract with the State Department.

Putting an armed force on the streets under that kind of nebulous control in a country where the United States is still attempting the win the hearts and minds of the populous is a recipe for disaster.

But Blackwater and other contractors have been operating with little or no restraints since the early days of the occupation, based on a one-paragraph subsection to a 2004 edict issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority. While the authority is defunct, its edict granting contractors immunity from the Iraqi legal process is still in effect.

License revoked

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has decided it is time to exercise his nation’s sovereignty. He has revoked Blackwater’s license to operate in Iraq. His announcement has had the effect of locking the doors on the U.S. Embassy until alternative protection can be arranged for traveling U.S. diplomats.

An earlier effort by Congress to establish guidelines for prosecuting contractors under U.S. law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, has gotten new impetus and there are sure to be hearings.

But aside from bringing attention to the obvious — that war is hell and in urban warfare innocent civilians die — the incident points up a flaw in the administration’s war plan that has been evident for years. This administration has done everything it could to make this war appear as painless as possible for the United States. It provided an inadequate number of troops to secure and hold the peace, it avoided calls from Congress to expand the armed services sufficiently to maintain even the 130,000 to 160,000 troops in Iraq, it took hundreds of billions of dollars in war costs off-budget, adding to the deficit, and it used tens of thousands of private contractors to make up for the shortage of troops.

It was a bad policy, poorly executed. We’re only beginning to see how bad and how poorly.