Do you really think the UN would do a better job of stabilizing Iraq? Do you think that letting the UN take over, and letting them fuck up would somehow be good for American PR?
No, I don’t have much faith in the UN’s nation building abilities.
However, I have more faith in it than I do in the US’s nation building abilities, and the nation would have the added advantage of not being viewed as much as an American puppet state, while at the same time signalling that America is not into invading soverign nations and installing puppet governments to the rest of the world.
OK, so I’m an idealist. Iraq is farked anyway, and I’m just looking at damage control. The UN can’t do any worse of a job than the US, and it would, you know, be legal in international law.
My “sense of self-righteousness” is quite irrelevant here. The fact is that the USA fucked up big time and I can say that without being oblifgated to find the answers to the fuck up. The fact that the USA fucked up does not diminish the rights of the Iraqis to self-govern and to not be ruled by outsiders.
Oh, the old utilitarian argument that they should not be free because they are better off being slaves of those who know better and who were destined to rule them. :rolleyes:
What did they get by winning Le Revolution a few hundred years earlier? Perfecting the art of guillotining during Le Reign of Terror only to have a new king 30 years later.
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Obviously you have no concept of the diference between the freedom of a relatively stable and just society and the freedom that anarchy brings.
I guess I got that idea from all the anti-US criticism. Regardless of whether we should or should not have gone to Iraq is largely a moot point at this time.
I think just about everyone (including Bush) wants us to get out of Iraq. What’s needed is a way that we can do that without leaving a completely fucked up country.
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They are in violation of the Geneva convention.
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They can and do get away with pimping 12 year old girls.
Am I the only person who cares about point #2?
Where on earth did you get that idea? The US government has never said anything about leaving Iraq. Never. They want to nominally transfer power to a puppet government who would want them to stay. A government who would want the Americans out of Iraq will not be tolerated by the US which is planning on keeping military bases in Iraq for many years and in controlling the flow of oil. So, no, Bush has no intention for American troops to leave Iraq any time soon. He just hope a puppet government can do the dirty work of subduing the Iraqis so the American troops can retire to their military bases. The fact is that the chances of any government appointed and backed by the USA having any possibility of success in Iraq are pretty close to zero. Things are not going as planned.
You don’t understand events that happened last week. You don’t understand events that happened 60 years ago. And you certainly don’t understand events that happened in the eighteenth century.
The French revolution happened in 1789, about 10 years after the French supported the American revolution and maybe started thinking “hey, why don’t we do this ourselves?”. Four years later in 1793, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded. The reign of terror ended a year later in 1794. France then got imperial ambitions, and was well on its way to taking over the entire world. You probably would remember this guy from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Concerted effort on the part of the rest of the world gets rid of Napoleon by 1812.
Napoleon reappears and has to be disposed of again in 1815. Permanently. King Loius XVIII gets put in his place. Gets overthrown by Charles X.
New King Charles X lasts until 1830, he gets turfed out in the July revolution. The French elect a King, Loius Philippe. In 1848 they elect another King, Loius Napoleon.
If I could interrupt the history lesson and get back to the OP.
The guys in photo don’t look like rent-a-cops to me. Blackwater Security Consulting even has their own helicopters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53059-2004Apr5.html?referrer=email
Yeah, the Washington Post requires registration, but all good GD denizens should have it.
Blackwater wasn’t in Iraq to get in the child prostitution business. I doubt they were doing anything contrary to international law either. Sure, referring to them as contractors as opposed to heavily armed security personell with military and Special Forces background was propaganda-like (McNeil-Lehr Newshour on PBS still referred to them as solely contractors last night BTW).
A little hi-jack about the desecration of the bodies:
If I was an Iraqi Sunni Baathist who was seeing his whole way of life going away and had innocent family members killed (at least 3 times what Al Quaeda did to the US), then I might not be beyond killing and desecrating their bodies either. Hell, I remember not long after 9/11 major media talk shows had people, including former US military officers, advocating face down burial in pig skins for Muslim enemies similar to what General Pershing allegedly did in the Phillipines early in the 20th Century.
According to Time, Blackwater’s being less than forthcoming about what they were doing in Fallujah:
Time also quotes people saying that the Blackwater people sometimes had some major gaps in their training, and that the regular military was less than fond of them. And this is one of the best such outfits.
kung fu lola - that one matters to me too. One possible solution to that sort of thing would be to require private security of US origin, operating in a country being pacified (or whatever term) by our military, be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice as a precondition to being allowed to do business in such a place.
Since when do you need to be a mercenary to rape 12 year old girls?
I don’t think the U.S. signed the Geneva convention, sounds like a dirty, commie lie to me.
Considering that Blackwater also employs people who used to work for a nice man named Pinochet (no word on whether they were actually death squad capitans or just regular army), who knows what sort of people we’ve got working for us. Blackwater certainly can tell us that its mercs were this or that in positive qualities, but often mercs are people who have dark pasts that make them ineligible for service in more above-board security occupations.
I think the most interesting thing about these guys is that normal military codes and laws don’t apply to them. So they can, for instance, test out neat new illegal weapons on the local hostile wildlife, operating outside of military regulations:
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2426405.php
Granted, military regulations are not always sensible. But they do generally exist for a reason, and employing mercs seems to tempt problems by allowing the U.S. to very easily bypass all the safeguards and protections it has set up to control and order the operations of the military. Sort of like the problem with bounty hunters here in the U.S.: they pretend to be law enforcement in order to do things that would be criminal if ordinary citizens did them, but they have no loyalty to the regulations that govern police proceedure and protect the public from overzealousness and carelessness.
It also doesn’t make us look very good after we made such a fuss about th Iraqis running around without uniforms.
I fail to see how anyone could fail to see that these “contractors” are valid targets. They were not delivering lollipops to limbless Iraqi orphans. They were transporting supplies (of whatever kind they may be, I don’t see that it matters) to troops of an occupying army. Since when is attacking the supply lines of an opposing force invalid military strategy. Just because the folks doing it are not wearing a uniform does not mean they get a free pass through Falluja.
I fail to understand why folks with obviously extensive military expertise would allow themselves to be placed in the situation of driving military supplies through an extremely hostile area with no backup and with insufficient armament. Were they incompetent? It sure sounds like they had all the requisite skills. Or is the company woefully unprepared for the task they have been hired to perform? As with som many things lately, someone obviously f*cked up badly, but the buck appears to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion.
I confess that I don’t really understand the concept of a “valid” target. Whether they are murderers or enemy insurrectionists, isn’t ambushing, killing, and degrading men who were keeping order in the society, as their employer (the US) is required to do as an occupying nation, pretty invalid and nasty? Or is this a legal distinction issue?
A valid target during war, or other military conflict, is military personnel and infrastructure, as far as I understand the accepted norms of modern warfare. Degrading and desecrating the bodies of these men is certainly “invalid” and repulsive. However, these individuals were not “keeping order” in any way. They were protecting the supply lines of an occupying force. Those who do not wish for this occupying force to be present in their environs, in ambushing this convoy and killing the security staff were attacking a “valid” military target. While these contractors are “civilan”, they are performing a military service to military personnel, and as such are as “valid” as targets as any military personnel. As far as whether it is “nasty” or not, it is of course unquestionably so. I don’t know that anyone is arguing that what happened was not reprehensible. My response was regarding whether these “mercenaries” are somehow magically not as valid a target as any other military presense in the country. I submit that by the fact that they were armed, authorized to use deadly force, and supporting a military objective, that they are a valid target. The US forces cannot turn over some traditionally military activities such as the supplying of provisions to some “hospitality” contractor and then get all indignant when said contractor’s personnel come under attack in a very active, very hostile area. You are correct that we are simply performing our dutins as an occupying power, but certainly you cannot expect the opposition to just decide to stop fighting because we asked really nicely not to.
An occupying force charged with a duty to maintain law and order. To be fair, I think we were remiss in our duties, and criminally negligent in not planning appropriately for this role. But these guys were supplying troops who are the legal authorities in Iraq, like it or not. I guess I agree with the point that attacking them is not significantly different from attacking uniformed troops: at least not if the U.S. wants to be consistent about its policy on non uniformed enemy being conventional targets of war.
http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4764154
Some Iraqis seem to think that American mercenaries are sniping them, sometimes even people giving medical aid.
Yet another problem with letting heavily armed people rove around without uniforms but with the attitude that they are in charge of fighting the war and suppressing inurgents: it’s easy for that to create confusion about who is doing what, and since there is no official direction or control over where they go and what they do, there’s no way to tell what they’ve been involved in. For all anyone knows, some sneaky insurgents could be sniping people and blaming the Americans.
Oops, I completely misread that. The “militiamen” are the insurgents in that article, and there is no mention of mercs. Next time, no skimming.
Has privateering been outlawed? I thought the practice had simply fallen into disuse. But the U.S. Constitution still authorizes Congress to issue “letters of marque and reprisal” – that clause has never been amended away.
I’m not contradicting you, it’s a legitimate question. For all I know there was some federal legislation or international treaty adopted at some point that forbade privateering. But I’ve never heard of it.
Of course, privateering is by definition limited to raiding commerce on the high seas. Since the United States is now the only important naval power left in the world, there would be no reason for the U.S. to revive privateering; there’s nothing licensed privateers could do that the U.S. Navy couldn’t do.
On the other hand, there would be nothing unconstitutional (so far as I know) about the U.S. government hiring mercenary soldiers, and even giving them a more important military role than the regular Army. History shows us that overreliance on mercenaries can be dangerous – sooner or later they realize that they have the strength to fight for themselves rather than their paymasters. That’s one of the reasons the Germans were able to conquer Rome. But there are some advantages to using mercenaries: They are not motivated by national hatreds or ideological or religious enthusiasms, thus are unlikely to commit any atrocities beyond ordinary raping and looting. They also bring a professional attitude to the whole business of war. During the Renaissance, most city-states of northern Italy relied on mercenary armies, and as a result battle casualties in their frequent wars were usually very low: If one mercenary army maneuvered into another into an indefensible position, the disadvantaged army would sooner surrender than fight to the death for the state they happened, at the moment, to serve; and the victors would graciously accept their surrender, knowing well that the soldiers they fought in this war might be fighting by their sides in the next one.
But what we’re dealing with in Iraq is a new thing: Mercenaries employed not by a government but by private corporations. That trend could lead to what amounts to a revival of feudalism! Suppose the corporate armies grow so big and strong that they can challenge state armies on equal terms? There are already many multinational corporations whose wealth, at least, is greater than the GDP’s of many sovereign states. If that wealth is ever directly translated into military power . . .
BrainGlutton, privateering was first banned by the Declaration of Paris (1856).
More recently the UN has a International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries
So it seems that any American nationals working for Blackwell would be exempted under 1© but non-US/Brit/Spain/Iraqi would be mercenaries.