Bye Bye, Blackwater

On Sept. 17, the Iraqi government ordered that Blackwater USA, the now infamous private contractor of security officers for the U.S. government, cease working and leave the country within six months. The order followed a horrendous display of force by Blackwater employees, in which 17 Iraqi civilians died and 24 others were wounded.

A month after this order, however, Blackwater’s officers are still active in Baghdad and its massive fort inside the Green Zone is still humming with activity. This defiance of the Iraqi government—and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s recent push for Blackwater to leave before the six-month deadline—is a terrible contradiction to America’s supposed respect for the autonomy of the new Iraqi government.

Of course, there are numerous issues that surround the exit of Blackwater USA, which holds a $1.2 billion contract with the U.S. government and supplies most of the 30,000 private security guards currently in Iraq. The State department has said repeatedly that other private contractors do not have the personnel, nor are military officers trained and in ample supply for necessary protection duties.

Nevertheless, we hope that the U.S. government is working as hard as possible to disentangle itself from Blackwater, and we are skeptical that there are few alternative options. In this ever-growing world of mercenary warfare—the U.S. government’s budget for private security contractors has increased from $1 billion to $4 billion in the past four years—supply for security personnel is presumably growing as well. DynCorp International, which is the second-largest supplier of security officers to the U.S. government behind Blackwater and has done so much less controversially, will hopefully be able to replace the fired officers in the short term.

In general, the private outsourcing of duties that should presumably go to the military or internal government officials is worrisome, though, at times, necessary. Although these officers fill gaps in the military’s resources and expertise, they are also detached from the moral and legal oversight that is (hopefully) associated with the U.S. military.

At certain points during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has not lived up to those standards, but the checks exist, as the trials of Abu Ghraib officers and alleged murders in the military demonstrate. For Blackwater, legal repercussions have been essentially nonexistent since 2004, when L. Paul Bremer, then the head administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, granted private contractors a complicated immunity scheme. While the order was supposedly not intended to give contractors “blanket immunity,” no contractors have been prosecuted in three years, even the drunk Blackwater guard who allegedly killed an Iraqi security official on Christmas Eve last year. And just yesterday the Associated Press reported that the State Department has given Blackwater personnel involved in the Sept. 16 incident immunity from prosecution.

The State Department recently announced that they would install video cameras in Blackwater convoys to check up on these officers. This action is a step forward, but it is not enough; all private contractors should work under the same legal network that other military officials work under, or at least those of internal State Department officers.

It seems inevitable that private contractors are going to play a role in the future of the U.S. government and military. The government should then not act like these officials are anomalies in the system, temporarily assisting something that will later be replaced by “real” officers. Contractors should be fully incorporated into the government machine that is spending nearly 1 billion dollars a day in Iraq. This change would hopefully entail a serious reversal in how private contractors are expected to act—both in terms of restraint and also in how those who fail to act appropriately are dealt with, both in terms of standards and laws.

The first step in this long transformation, however, is to remove Blackwater from Iraq.