The ‘Coalition of the Billing’

July 4, 2007

The Washington Post’s Steve Fainaru had a fascinating item a couple of weeks ago in which he detailed the extent of the work private military contractors are doing in Iraq. The piece described an environment in which more than 100 private security companies operate outside of Iraqi law, providing protection for top administration officials.

As for casualties, we know about U.S. military losses, and we have a vague sense of Iraqi losses, but attacks on private security forces go unreported. The Pentagon won’t release statistics on contractor casualties or the number of attacks, and according to one veteran who spent 2 1/2 years in Iraq, it’s because the administration doesn’t want Americans to know about these other Americans who are fighting and dying in large numbers.

Fainaru didn’t nail down just how big a private force we’re talking about. Today, the LA Times’ T. Christian Miller adds some surprising details.

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government’s capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Some of the details are still pretty fuzzy. As James Joyner noted, a majority of these civilians working in Iraq are, in fact, Iraqis. What’s more, they’re taking on construction and infrastructure duties, not security roles.

Joyner’s not wrong, but there’s a flip-side.

The 180,000 civilians doesn’t “fully” include USAID and State Department contractors, nor thousands of Americans, financed by public U.S. funds, who are providing private security. How many thousands? According to the Times piece, somewhere between 6,000 and 30,000, all of whom are operating outside the chain of command and independent of Iraqi law.

That these ambiguities exist at all underscores part of the problem. No one seems to know how many contractors are there, what their responsibilities are, and/or how many of them are being killed.

Ultimately, uncertainties aside, it’s the biggest military outsourcing project anyone’s ever seen. As Brookings’ Peter Singer concluded, the numbers of private contractors “illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It’s the coalition of the billing.”

If the private contractors in Iraq were here and operating here as they do there…outside any law or Constitutional command, There would be a huge civil war here also.
We’ve released the “carpetbaggers” (no offense CB) on Iraq. No wonder the people hating America is growing to such gigantic proportions.
Greed….I mean…uh “money trumps…..uh …er…peace…:sometimes.” –George Bush.

  • As Brookings’ Peter Singer concluded, the numbers of private contractors “illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops.

    We are “at war” in order to line the pockets of the owners and shareholders of these corporate providers of place holding mercenaries. We went to “war” with the amount of U.S. military troops and materials needed to make the whole scheme take off because going to war with a full on corporate army would have been disconcerting and unseemly to the American public and the rest of the world. But ShrubCo would have preferred to do it that way.

    Ya know that thing about not knowing how many mercs have died or how many there are and the general vagueness that sort of follows those folks around as they go about their business at twice the cost and 1 zillionth the accountability of a standard issue American soldier? Well ShrubCo likes it like that. They love it like that. They wish the whole world could be like that. And they dream of their whole little scam of a war someday morphing into something as hard to hold as an invisible, shape shifting bar of wet soap.

    We went in with enough troops to crank their baby up. How hard is it to stop once it’s going? They just needed to get it started.

    You start your war with the troops you have, not the murky, amorphous and silent corporate army you wish you had. That comes later.

  • and how many of these have been killed/wounded? It’s a nice way to keep the “official” casualty numbers down since you never here about these other guys

  • No one seems to know how many contractors are there, what their responsibilities are, and/or how many of them are being killed.

    I’d wonder how many Iraqis have these “security” contractors killed?

  • We have an American-Sponsored anational Private Corporate Empire in Iraq/n privately, and for all intents secretly, constructed on the backs of American Soldiers and American Taxpayers and a Corporate Criminal Cabal in charge of American National “Security”?

    Someone please explain the genius behind not impeaching because of a 67-vote final retreat of cowardice or whatever excuse you’d like to waste your time with.

    Do the American People literally have to march on Washington, D.C. to assume the rightful power vested in We, The People, to apprehend the unlawful control of our Federal Government from a Private Entity? Because, I am willing to do so. Not because I am a Democrat, but because I am an American.

  • Well put, burro.

    Oh and JKap, one way to look at impeachment is we simply can’t do it. Any attempt to do so would stick at the “Liberman-McConnell Line” of GOP pseudo-filibustering. Harry Reid has enough on his plate trying to advance a set of policy prescriptions with a tenuous 49 seat majority.

    Another way to look at it is if we were to impeach, and it went as expected (basically the same as Clinton, impeached but acquitted) it would complete the Right’s meme of “Bush-hate” and give them a rhetorical out for the atrocities they committed. They can say the impeachment shows the rabid Congress went after Bush completely for Clinton payback, and thus solidify in John Q. Citizen’s mind the idea of a beleaguered, yet honorable, President under fire from his enemies.

    I say let them continue to fuck up and hold them accountable by a sweeping, historic victory in both houses in 2008. We have enough votes to stop most of the major damage for the time being, and there is little good side to impeachment proceedings, so it seems the wiser course to me.

  • JKap @ 5, I think it will come down to marching on Washington with pitchforks and torches and constructing a guillotine near the Washington Monument to get through to Shrub that we have had enough.

  • Re: Indigent A-hole @ #6 [no offense]

    I’m sorry, but your dispassionate analysis is painfully inadequate for my particular taste for American liberty and justice. But I’m glad that you’ve found a justification for not impeaching that you can accept and still live with yourself.

    By the way, if Joe Sixpack ever found out what his friendly neighborhood representatives have really been up to in Washington, D.C., I think almost all of the bums would be kicked out. But that would require our “leadership” being outspoken about the Private Corporate Cabal that has been substituted for our rightful Representative Democracy and you hardly even hear a whimper about the Abominable Administration unless you look at the blogs. Some leadership I say.

    I Heart Private Armies.

  • No one seems to know how many contractors are there, what their responsibilities are, and/or how many of them are being killed.

    Right. And we’re not going to find out.

  • So much of what is taking place in Iraq comes down to and back to the money. IF the DC DEMS were to mount a frontal assault on the Bush/Cheney regimes tax cut plan outs and go after Bush/Cheney on why there is no national war tax,firm corporate war tax surcharges and no war tax levies on Wall Street winnings and windfall profiteering that would surely put the pain where Bush/Cheney and the GOPer’s do not want to feel it.
    Sadly the DC DEMS likely enough are too far into the same “buy-ins” as the DC GOPer’s so this line of attack will never be mounted in any real and meaningful sense.
    See DEM 2008 presidential contestants takes on this.
    The three monkeys treatment that this “buy the army you need and want” for Iraq operations from security to logistics to build/rebuild task forcing surely is one the DC DEMS seem content to let be.
    Invading Iraq surely was/is largely about putting in place a set of Iraq political/governance/”open door” conditions that will permit/allow expansive corporatist/globalist wealth grabs(see Iraq Oil Law) (see Iraq de-nationalization) (see American long term “Iraq stay and sway” intentions).
    Invading Iraq was and remains an example of the costs being socialized onto the American taxpayers and the potential payouts/big profiteering being consigned to the corporatists/globalists/private sector militarists.
    By rights it is the American taxpayer who truly should be first in line for any big Iraqi oil bonanzas and resultant wealth payouts. After all who is paying for this Shock and Awe,Take and Shake and Stay and Sway in Iraq? That is not to diminish in any way or form the terrible price being placed on all Iraqis in so many large and small ways. The Iraqis are seeing their homeland torn/blown apart,losing their homes,losing family and friends,becoming refugees everyday. The debasement of Iraqi society by American ME desires for hegemony and American Militarism are Hitlerian in scale.
    Of course in this sense the American taxpayers are getting bent over just like the poor Iraqis over/for preferred Bush/Cheney Iraqi oil desires/outcomes.
    The stealth mercenary presence in Iraq is much like those stealth like superbases the USA is so hell bent on setting in place. Where was/is the DC debate on any of this?
    The DC DEMS either are in on the deal or are just plain not competent enough to figure out where the weak Bush/Cheney fiscal three monkeys are.
    It all comes down and back to money. And WashDC must obey that one real world rule no matter what. When the American currency has gone all funny money and worthless WashDC will have to face that head on.
    The militarists will scream over the steep,deep funding pull backs and cuts.
    The corporatists will scream over the tax loads being imposed and their sweetheart subsidies being slashed. The American taxpayers will get the hangover bill from all these years of funny money borrow,spend and pay the interest gaming.
    Social Security payouts?Medicare?A National HealthCare plan?
    Dream if you must but whaddya think WashDC is going to do with’em?
    Iraq truly has become a messy affair since Shock and Awe and WashDC is playing three monkeys like the money will never run out.
    But it will. And that day ain’t nearly so far off as it was once was.

  • E-to-T, I read somewhere today, C&L,Raw Story,Hinesight (one of them,I think) that 1,000 have been killed.

    And I’m with JKap and tko,it’s time to march. Time for the pitchforks. Time for the tar and feathers. And I love the idea of a guillotine. Can’t we behead them in effigy?

    Fly your flag upside down until this illegal, immoral cabal is gone.

    Impeachment hearings today; war crimes tribunals tommorrow.

  • Here’s the deal. Private contractors are only ways to pour government money into private well connected companies. The number of private contractors are more a barometer on how corrupt the Bush administration is rather than a need for troops.

    Read Blackwater. With most of our troops fighting overseas, the largest private Army in the world looks very powerful. Very powerful, indeed.

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