America’s mercenaries smell the blood (and the money) and are returning to Iraq.
Mercs are a great thing for the U.S. government, in that they aren’t counted as “troops,” or as “boots on the ground,” even while they are both. The Defense Department can disavow any mischief the contractors get up like, such as murdering civilians, and keep the headcount low and the body count low when things are going well, or bad. It only costs money, and that America has a bottomless pool of, as long as it being spent on something violent abroad instead of helping Americans at home (which is socialism, sonny.)
So let’s look at some numbers.
The number of private contractors working for the U.S. Defense Department in Iraq grew eight-fold over the past year, a rate that far outpaces the growing number of American troops training and advising Iraqi soldiers battling Islamic State militants.
As of January, 2,028 military contractors were in Iraq, up from just 250 one year earlier, according to the Pentagon. There are another another 5,800 State Department contractors in Iraq, plus an unknown number of Americans working as trainers and repairpeople who are employed by the U.S. weapons manufacturers themselves.
So that’s 7,828 known U.S. government contractors with their boots on the ground in Iraq. There are roughly 3,700 American troops there now alongside them.
(But let’s keep it real – there are 30,455 contractors for the U.S. government in Afghanistan playing their Mad Max games)
Many of the contractors in Iraq are from well-known warzone profiteers like KBR, DynCorp, and Fluor Corporation, the three firms hired by the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program.
The State Department still employs personnel from whatever Blackwater is now known as. The company changes names more often than a stripper.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.
