I am shocked, shocked, that these trigger-happy mercenaries would fuck up so badly...
Wow!......just like the 3rd Blackwater Armoured Division on their drive through Northern France way back when in '44. Civilians, schmilians! Good job FDR cashiered them there and then......... along with the mass court martials.
Wait for the ensuing hue and cry over “Why are our people are being videotaped? Don't you realize that we're tying their hands? Stress! Stress! Stress! Yada, yada, yada!”
The video age is a bitch. A stone-cold bitch.
I'm still waiting for the confessions/video of our other terrorists who are doing a good job of diving Iraq according to plan.
It is time to withdraw...the contractors and mercenaries.
Withdrawl of the mercs is not going to happen. It's not going to be allowed to happen.
The reason is simple and, by this time, ought to be very well understood. Except that humans don't do "logic" worth a damn when their interests are bound up in continuation of a belief in fantasy.
The army, from July of 1973 on, has been all-volunteer by policy. That means that its ranks are filled by enlistment rather than coercion.
Now, as every reader of this blog and Steve's earlier one knows, the volunteer soldiers who have been sent to Iraq have been multiply, seriously, and systematically betrayed by the very regime that sent them out to fight.
This has become public knowledge.
Many of the wingnuts have chosen to shut their eyes and ears, but news stories of the Great Betrayal have managed to surface even in America's captive press. Which is saying a lot. In fact, it's saying more than a lot. For every story blurted out by the pathetic marionettes we call "newsmen", there are probably 10 or 15 more left in the unreported murk. Quietly. Waiting to go off like unexploded bombs in the minds of the next generation of kids, 10 or 20 years from now.
To say this has hurt recruitment is like saying that severing the support members of a suspension bridge "undermines its stability". Being a soldier isn't grunt work anymore. Those readers who parsed the last sentence of the previous paragraph and absorbed the meaning will also understand that the damage to recruitment will not be limited to merely this year or the next year or the year after that. We are going to have to live with the consequences of the Great Betrayal for the next one to two generations, minimum.
Once upon a time, you could just kidnap whoever was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and turning the resulting terrified mob over to your drillmasters. This worked really well 300 years ago. It does NOT get the job done today.
So just exactly where are we going to get our soldiers???
I presume nobody here is silly enough to assume that we are simply going to stop attempting to extort other countries for what we want whenever we feel the urge. That would require an overthrow of the oligarchy, which is not going to happen. If you doubt this, examine the proposals of the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton. And just about every other serious Democratic contender, for that matter.
Return to a draft means the fall of the government that achieves it. Not an option.
Continuation of the all-volunteer army, in the form it had by 1900, is also not an option. Any more. The only people volunteering by this time are the totally deluded and the utterly desperate.
We are thus required to fall back upon an option which has had problems every time it has been tried. Mercenaries.
The French have made this work by (1) using mercs as a supplement to their main force, (2) assembling the merc units from ethnically disparate groups, and (3) running them with French officers, who exert strict control.
Almost nobody else who went the route route of hiring mercenaries has elected for this disciplined approach. The usual recourse is to let out contracts, and hire externally formed bodies of mercs, under their own officers, to do the job you need done.
This is what we have done with Blackwater and the other contracting firms. Note that, as Pat Lang has just reminded us ...
A directive issued by U.S. occupation authorities in 2004 granted contractors, U.S. troops and many other foreign officials immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.
Security contractors are also not subject to U.S. military law..
Now a few words about how this works out in practice, from somebody who had a good many years to examine the consequences firsthand and ponder them.
The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.
This is the system that we have now been thrust into.
Oh, our oligarchs will EVENTUALLY quit trying to extort what they want from other countries. I fear, however, that this will only happen when our country goes bankrupt, so it can no longer hire mercenaries. 
Oh, our oligarchs will EVENTUALLY quit trying to extort what they want from other countries. I fear, however, that this will only happen when our country goes bankrupt, so it can no longer hire mercenaries.
From the way things are going, that may very well be soon.
Stormcrow... nice Machiavelli quote!
Stormcrow -
Nice.
We are coming up on an issue which transcends the concerns about all the mercs in Iraq, and practically speaking, all of the rest of the mechanics of the shitmire.
It is this:
Are the democrats craven enough and stupid enough to let bush and the republicans hang on to dump the flaming shitbag in their laps as they leave office?
Because if they are, then there will follow a lightning-quick change in the DNA indentification of who knocked up Rosemary and sired the bloody little horned bastard now raising so much hell in Iraq.
He will totally become the Democrats' progeny, and as he grows like the creature in the first ALIEN movie, the republicans will sharpen their chain saws and go into multiple orgasm at the democrats volunteering to pay political child support for his maturation process.
Will they do this?
We have 13 months to find out.
Actually, we will know sooner, as we get into the meat of the campaign and find out how many of the three leading dem candidates will give the GOP a pass by saying:
"Let's don't talk about the past and all of the lies and bullshit that was used to get us into this; let's talk about the happy ending which, just like george bush says, is still possible."
Boys and girls, it's an either-or situation. One of the parties is going to get stuck with the responsibility for this monumental fuckup.
Unless the democrats want to funk the job of making sure that it's not them, they'd better shit or get off the fucking pot, and soon.
Oh, they'll do it, Tanbark. Hell, they're doing it even as we speak.
But why?
Well, these are not normal political times. Once, something like this would have been unthinkable, and for reasons that were purely selfish and self-serving. (Never mind such high-falutin' terms as "ethics" or "morality".) The Dems would not be so "stupid" because they knew they'd be punished for it at the ballot box. Co-incidentally, they were not so far above, remote and seperated from the average citizenry at this point in time.
Nowadays, it's a very different story. The "common people" might as well be a seperate species as far as the Democratic Elites are concerned. We're the enemy to them, and the Media Courtiers and GOP leaders are their allies. Digby's written quite a bit about this situation lately, and I agree with most of her thoughts on the subject.
I dunno, John. I can't believe that people like Leahy, Waxman, Ted Kennedy (whom at least believes in noblesse oblige, etc, and, at minimum, the 21 senators who would not vote to authorize the loon crusade, will committ ritual seppuku by volunteering to take over the clusterfuck. I don't want to believe it.
One caveat in your/our concern about them lying doggo for the bullshit.
It IS 13 months until the election, and about 4 months until the primaries get cranked up, I believe.
Words repeated too often and too long lose their impact; their edge.
As things get worse, I concede that a firestorm of anger; a recital of all the wretched lies and distortions that were used to start this, and to sustain it, and the outrage OVER it, will have lots more effect
6 months from now, than they will now.
I'm willing (barely) to wait until the primaries, to see what our candidates and the party will do, as far as nailing bush and the GOP for what they've created, goes. At that point, it's likely that what is going on in Iraq will not be spinnable as "progress" in any way, shape, or form.
And if, at that point, the democrats are willing to let bush and the warbots get away with talking about "progress" without publicly dropping trou and mooning them for their bloody, lying, bullshit, then we'll know that it's a done deal.
Look at it this way, Tanbark: It's really not so dissimiliar to the seemingly odd behavior of one Larry Craig. Once upon a time, a scandal like the one surrounding Craig would have brought about complete abject humiliation, as well as his immediate withdrawal from any form of public life at all. If not suicide. But Craig is choosing to brazen it out, obviously thinking the public's memory as it stands these days is fleeting and that he can get away with it. "Shame? What's that?"
Let's not mince words: America is coming more and more to resemble pre-Revolutionary France. It's not exactly difficult to notice, and the country's Elite are becoming ever more paranoid as a result, not least of all because they refuse to concede an inch to the rest of us. I've heard the theory that FDR was basically saving the Ruling Class from themselves with his reforms back in the day, and while I'm not sure I buy that, it's certainly undeniable that that was one of the outcomes of his policies.
There's no FDR these days. Absolutely no one in any position of power who's willing to take hard steps or make even tiny changes that will benefit the country as a whole, entirely for reasons that are self-serving and have to do with nothing nobler than political survival and purely selfish personal ambition. The Democratic "leaders" are that terrified of crossing their Corporate Masters. Standards have deteriorated that far.
And so they rationalize. At least, the "good" ones (or good-ish ones) do. They go through tortured self-justifications, telling themselves that they're not "as bad" as those awful Republicans, even if they vote exactly the same way...at least, they're not as mean about it! It all comes down to hot air, rhetoric and propaganda. Nothing concrete. Nothing real. As I've often said, perfectly intelligent people often fall into the trap of swallowing their own bullshit, especially in the field of politics. It happens all the time. (And I might add, a side-effect of this attitude is that these fuckers truly come to believe there's a difference between them and the Rethugs, even if there isn't, and they get genuinely pissy and put-out when we grubby peasants aren't sufficiently grateful for the few crumbs they occasionally toss. They come to resent us more and more, and there's nothing unfeigned about that.)
And those are the "good ones". The "bad ones" (i.e. the majority of the Washington Demcorats) are straightforward hustlers and boodlers, who recognize the modern political scene as a sweet little racket, and they aren't about to rock the boat, are they? But "good" or "bad", most - if not all - of them are already wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of your average schlub, and they naturally identify more with their fellow Elites in the media and the GOP than with the people who vote them into office.
Are there still any Dems actually worth a damn? Sure, a few. The men you mention. None of whom are exactly spring chcikens or are likely to be alive all that much longer. (Kennedy, in particular, is an old warhorse.) And they're outnumbered by the crooks and the corrupt, who are completely short-sighted and will vote against their own best interests in the long run if they'll gain so much as a bus token in the short term...for themselves, of course. They certainly won't risk a thing for any of us common scum.
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