[Peace-discuss] "Neither C. nor O. have real plans to end the occupation"

[C. G. Estabrook]

March 19, 2008
by The Nation
Blackwater Seeps Into the Campaign
by Jeremy Scahill

Hillary Clinton has just become the most significant US political figure to come 
out in favor of banning Blackwater and other armed private security contractors 
from operating in Iraq. “When I am President I will ask the Joint Chiefs for 
their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors with the 
goal of ultimately implementing a ban on such contractors,” she declared in a 
major policy speech on Monday.

Her position is a welcome development for those in the Congress, such as 
Illinois Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky and Vermont Senator Bernie 
Sanders, who have long sought to rein in private security contractors.

In her speech, Clinton slammed Obama on this issue, saying, “Senator Obama and I 
have a substantive disagreement here. He won’t rule out continuing to use armed 
private military contractors in Iraq to do jobs that historically have been done 
by the US military or government personnel.” The Clinton campaign wants voters 
to believe it is that simple. It is not.

First, Clinton’s timing is suspect. She has served for five years on the Senate 
Armed Services Committee and has done nothing to end the use of Blackwater and 
other private security forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the 
aftermath of the September 2007 Nisour Square massacre, during which Blackwater 
operatives gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians, Clinton condemned the 
company’s conduct but declined to sign on as a co-sponsor to legislation 
introduced by Sanders and Schakowsky in November 2007 seeking to ban Blackwater 
and other mercenary companies.

Instead, she chose to do it in late February, after The Nation published the 
comments of a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama who said, “I can’t rule 
out, I won’t rule out, private security contractors” in Iraq if Obama becomes 
president and that Obama does not intend to sign onto the Sanders-Schakowsky 
legislation. The next day, after refusing for over a week to provide a comment 
to The Nation on the issue, Clinton’s staff released a statement saying she 
would endorse the Stop Outsourcing Security Act to “ban the use of Blackwater 
and other private mercenary firms in Iraq.” Clinton declared, “The time to show 
these contractors the door is long past due.” The statement was released five 
days before the make-or-break primaries in Texas and Ohio, when the New York 
Senator was on the ropes.

On Monday, Clinton said, “I believe what matters in this campaign is not just 
the promises we’ve made to end the war; what matters is what we’ve actually done 
when it came time to match words with action. Because more than anything else, 
what we’ve done is an indication of what we’ll do.” On the issue of Blackwater, 
Clinton has been MIA for years.

Clinton’s campaign is well aware that Obama has been ahead of the curve on the 
issue of armed private contractors in Iraq–and certainly ahead of her. In 
October 2007, Clinton claimed she was unaware that Bush had granted Blackwater 
and other contractors immunity in 2004. “Maybe I should have known about it; I 
did not know about it,” she said.

On Monday, Obama struck back. “Now, let me be clear: I actually introduced 
legislation in the Senate before Senator Clinton even mentioned this that said 
we had to crack down on private contractors like Blackwater because I don’t 
believe that they should be able to run amok and put our own troops in danger, 
get paid three or four times or ten times what our soldiers are getting paid. I 
am the one who has been opposed to those operators. Senator Clinton is a late 
comer to that. But you know this is what happens during political season and I 
understand it.”

In February 2007, Obama introduced contractor reform and oversight legislation 
that has become the Democrats’ major plan in the Congress. Obama’s bill seeks to 
make all contractors subject to prosecution in US civilian courts for crimes 
committed on a foreign battlefield. The bill is not without its problems. In 
theory, FBI investigators would deploy to the crime scene, gather evidence and 
interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions.

Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively police such an 
enormous deployment of private contractors (at present basically equal to the 
number of active duty US troops in Iraq), the legislation would give the private 
military industry a tremendous PR victory. The companies could finally claim 
that a legally accountable structure governed their operations, yet they would 
be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce. 
Perhaps that is why the industry has passionately backed this approach.

But despite the measure’s significant flaws, Obama did introduce it eight months 
before Nisour Square, at a time when Clinton was largely inactive on the issue, 
despite her significant Congressional influence.

In response to Clinton’s speech Monday, Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said, 
“Hillary Clinton is attacking Barack Obama on an issue where he has led and she 
did nothing until her campaign fell behind.”

Beyond the rhetoric, how serious is Hillary Clinton about stopping Blackwater 
and other armed private security forces in Iraq? Obama’s campaign made a 
difficult admission, likely at odds with many of his supporters, by saying he 
wouldn’t rule out using these forces because they will be needed, at least at 
first, to implement his Iraq plan. The State Department does not have the 
official security agents available to protect the massive army of diplomats in 
Iraq, which Obama intends to maintain and, perhaps, increase. The campaign says 
Obama wants to change that and to make all security personnel official US 
Diplomatic Security agents, but that could take years, according to the State 
Department.

Like Obama, Clinton has an Iraq plan that will keep thousands of officials and 
others who require diplomatic security in Iraq. If she thinks the military wants 
to do that job, she hasn’t been reading the papers. If she thinks there are 
enough official State Department agents to do it right away, she hasn’t been 
looking at the numbers: Blackwater has almost as many security operatives 
working in Iraq (nearly 1,000) as the State Department has available in the rest 
of the world combined (1,450).

At the end of the day, both Obama and Clinton have Iraq plans that for the 
foreseeable future will necessitate using private armed security forces. While 
Obama’s campaign has acknowledged that fact, Clinton has seized it as an 
opportunity to attack Obama. Short of dramatically shrinking the size of the US 
civilian and diplomatic presence in Iraq, the next president may have no choice 
but to continue the current contracting arrangements. If, as President, Obama or 
Clinton did order the military to take over the protection of diplomats, that 
would result in an increase of US military convoys on the streets of Iraq, 
regularly placing US soldiers in direct–and likely lethal–contact with Iraqi 
civilians and vehicles.

In the bigger picture, the most disturbing aspect of this is that neither 
Clinton nor Obama have real plans to end the occupation. Their “withdrawal” 
plans will keep thousands of US military forces in Iraq, along with the Green 
Zone, the massive US embassy and the Baghdad airport. This could add up to as 
many as 80,000 troops, not including the armed security for diplomatic convoys 
currently provided by Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp.

If Hillary Clinton expects any credibility on this issue, especially after her 
recent condemnation of Blackwater and the pledge to ban private security forces 
in Iraq, it would mean radically revising her Iraq plan to one of complete 
withdrawal. That means no residual forces, “strike forces,” or the army of 
“diplomats” necessitating security, which regularly proves fatal for Iraqi 
civilians. At the same time, if either Obama or Clinton really wants to end the 
occupation, it means a pledge to swiftly withdraw all US troops and contractors. 
At this point, neither seems willing to do that.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The 
Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin 
Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Copyright © 2008 The Nation