I guess i don't want to be the target of the righteous indignation when i'm not at fault for the situation being complained about, and it seemed you were beating up on me.
The questions which come to my mind are: Do we think about the probably consequences of wars before we engage in them? (To which the answer is complex, but, basically, if we haven't had an unpleasant experience of war recently, i'd say no, we don't think about the probable consequences; additionally, you get propaganda efforts such as the administration's touting "shock and awe" and alleging the Iraqis would strew flowers at the feet of our soldiers). And, what should be done about it. The latter is more problematic. Most Americans do not either question an administration who alleges a threat and calls for war (c.f. Goering's comment on the ease of leading the public to war); nor are they (the public) aware of situations such as that with the private contractors, and generally don't delve that deeply into public affairs. So how do you whip up enough interest that politicians are willing to react?
Also, i think that the assumption that employing private contractors makes it easier to go to war is not well-founded. They are not the ones who usually actively go into harm's way, so the loss of troops isn't altered or is altered very, very little, by the use of private contractors. To me, it is more interesting that these jokers are employed for security services--something the military ought always to do itself. And i question if private contractors are any longer used to save the government money. I suspect that although cost-savings may have been the original impetus (after all, we don't expect the military to raise the cattle and harvest the grain with which it feeds its members) and a good one, that it has now gotten out of hand. I suspect that, like defense equipment contracting, all the parties concerned, including politicians and retired military members, have a sweet deal, which they don't want nosey reporters and citizens to queer.
I suspect that a careful investigation of military contracting would probably reveal that the military could actually do a lot of these things much more cheaply than contractors. I have no doubt the Mr. Cheney really, really doesn't want anyone going over Halliburton's books with a fine-toothed comb.
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What we are witnessing here if one were to sum all of this up is the outsourcing of our miliary through private contractors. There is MUCH more money to be made via the military industrial complex as opposed to being a soldier on the front lines. It is one of the prime reasons why we are in Iraq, and why the Bush doctrine is now one of pre-emptive invasions of countries that never posed a threat to us.
We will never leave Iraq, because we are now occupying a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world. We are FAR too dependent on foreign oil to consider leaving. We are already building many permanent military bases, and (as Ron Paul said in the last debates) building a U.S. embassy the size of the Vatican, with a price-tag of over half a billion dollars. We've handed out future contracts to American oil companies for control of the Iraqi oil, with very little left over for foreign companies/domestic industry.
We are essentially raping Iraq of it's oil, displacing millions of Iraqis, and making a buck with these private military contractors like Blackwater. It is a for-profit war; a corporate war. And we are geopolitically situating ourselves squarely in the heart of the Middle East so we can control that precious resource for ourselves.
War for oil, war for profit. This is what it's always been. This is the real mission.
