The dark truth about Blackwater

For all the hubbub over the recent Blackwater incident, the American public remains largely unaware of the private military industry. While private forces make up more than 50 percent of the overall operation in Iraq, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they have been mentioned in only a quarter of 1 percent of all American media stories on Iraq.

Yet, at the same time, contractors are one of the most visible and hated aspects of the American presence in Iraq. "They seal off the roads and drive on the wrong side. They simply kill," Um Omar, a Baghdad housewife, told Agence France Press about Blackwater in a report in mid-September. A traffic policeman at Al-Wathba square in central Baghdad concurred: "They are impolite and do not respect people, they bump other people's cars to frighten them and shout at anyone who approaches them ... Two weeks ago, guards of a convoy opened fire randomly that led to the killing of two policemen ... I swear they are Mossad," he said, referring to the Israeli spy service, which is a catch-all for anything perceived as evil in the Arab world.

It is also important to note that Iraqi civilians do not differentiate the acts of the private military contractors from the overall U.S. military effort, just because they are outside the chain of command.

The point here is not that all contractors are "cowboys," "unprofessional" or "killers," as Blackwater and other contractors are often described. Most are highly talented ex-soldiers. However, their private mission is different from the overall public operation. Those, for example, doing escort duty are going to be judged by their corporate bosses solely on whether they get their client from point A to B, not whether they win Iraqi hearts and minds along the way. Ann Exline Starr, a former Coalition Provisional Authority advisor, described the difference between when she traveled with a U.S. military escort and with guards from Blackwater and another State Department-contracted security firm, DynCorp. While the uniformed soldiers kept her safe, they also did such things as playing cards and drinking tea with local Iraqis. The private contractors had a different focus. "What they told me was, 'Our mission is to protect the principal at all costs. If that means pissing off the Iraqis, too bad.'"

This "protection first and last" mentality has led to many common operating practices that clearly enrage locals. In an effort to keep potential threats away, contractors drive convoys up the wrong side of the road, ram civilian vehicles, toss smoke bombs, and fire weaponry as warnings, all as standard practices. After a month spent embedded with Blackwater contractors in Baghdad, journalist Robert Young Pelton said, "They're famous for being very aggressive. They use their machine guns like car horns."

As far back as 2005, U.S. officers in Iraq such as Col. Hammes were worried that while contractors may have been fulfilling their contract, they were also "making enemies each time they went out." U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor, one of the leading experts on counterinsurgency, similarly noted in January 2007, that "if they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious, whatever it may be, they may be operating within their contract -- to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring the people over to your side. I would much rather see basically all armed entities in a counter-insurgency operation fall under a military chain of command."

The formula for failure isn't hard to calculate. An Iraqi is driving in Baghdad, on his way to work. A convoy of black-tinted SUVs comes down the highway at him, driving in his lane, but in the wrong direction. They are honking their horns at the oncoming traffic and firing machine gun bursts into the road, in front of any vehicle that gets too close. The Iraqi veers to the side of the road. As the SUVs drive by, Western-looking men in sunglasses point machine guns at him. Over the course of the day, that Iraqi civilian might tell X people about how "the Americans almost killed me today, and all I was doing was trying to get to work." Y is the number of other people that convoy ran off the road on its run that day. Z is the number of convoys in Iraq that day. Multiply X times Y times Z times 365, and you have the mathematical equation of how to lose a counterinsurgency within a year.

And these are standard occurrences that go on in the regular course of contractor operations, where no one is actually harmed. Unfortunately, however, contractors have also been involved in a pattern of abuses that go far beyond the recent Blackwater incident.

For example, a reported 100 percent of the translators and up to 50 percent of the interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison were private contractors from the Titan and CACI firms, respectively. The U.S. Army found that contractors were involved in 36 percent of the proven abuse incidents from 2003-04 and identified six particular employees as being culpable in the abuses. However, while the enlisted U.S. Army soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were properly court-martialed for their crimes, three years later not one of the private contractors named in the U.S. Army investigation reports has been charged, prosecuted or punished.

In another incident in 2005, armed contractors from the Zapata firm were detained by U.S. forces, who claimed they saw the private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but also at U.S. Marines. Again, they were not charged, as the legal issues remained murky.

Other cases in 2006 included the Aegis company's "trophy video," in which contractors set video of them shooting at civilians to Elvis' song "Runaway Train," and put it on the Internet, and the alleged joyride shootings of Iraqi civilians by a Triple Canopy supervisor (which became the subject of a lawsuit after the two employees, who claim to have witnessed the shootings, lost their jobs).

Blackwater is thus not the only company to be accused of incidents that negatively impact the battle to win hearts and minds. But Blackwater has earned a special reputation among Iraqis. Much of this stems from the highly visible role it has played in escorting U.S. officials. Iraqi government officials claim that there have been at least seven incidents of civilian harm in which the company has been involved. The most notable that has been reported in the press was on Christmas Eve 2006, when a Blackwater employee allegedly got drunk while inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and got in an argument with a guard of the Iraqi vice president. He then shot the Iraqi dead. The employee was quickly flown out of the country. Nine months later, he has not been charged with any crime. Imagine the same thing happening in the U.S. -- an Iraqi embassy guard, drunk at a Christmas party in D.C., shooting a Secret Service agent guarding Vice President Cheney -- and you can see some potential for how Blackwater's Christmas tidings were not happy ones for U.S. efforts at winning hearts and minds.

In May 2007, there were two more reported shootings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors, including an Interior Ministry employee, which led to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police. Thus, many felt the great tension between the firm and the locals would soon erupt. In the weeks before the September killings, Matthew Degn, a senior American civilian advisor to the Interior Ministry's intelligence directorate, described Blackwater as giving rise to "a powder keg" of anger.

U.S. military officers frequently express their frustrations with sharing the battlefield with such private forces operating under their own rules and agendas, and worry about the consequences for their own operations. As far back as 2005, for example, Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, deputy commander of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division (responsible for security in the Baghdad area at the time), tried to keep track of contractor shootings in his sector. Over the course of two months, he found 12 shootings that resulted in at least six Iraqi civilian deaths and three more wounded. As Horst tellingly put it, "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath."

Several weeks before the most recent Blackwater incident, an Iraqi official explained how the contractors' actions were reverberating against the wider U.S. effort in Iraq and beyond. "They are part of the reason for all the hatred that is directed at Americans, because people don't know them as Blackwater, they know them only as Americans. They are planting hatred, because of these irresponsible acts."

The Iraqi official's view is echoed by many. Jack Holly is a retired Marine colonel who, as director of logistics for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has worked with several firms in Iraq. As an example of the costs to key efforts, he described how Iraqi employees of the national rail system were so intimidated by Blackwater escorts that they refused to meet with State Department officials there to help them with the reconstruction effort. Of the Blackwater contractors he noted, "Their aggressive attitude is not what you would say is trying to mitigate disagreements between two societies."

These perceptions of a contractor force run amok help to undermine the very justification for the U.S. effort in Iraq. As an Interior Ministry official said of the Blackwater contractors hired by the U.S., "They consider Iraqis like animals, although actually I think they may have more respect for animals. We have seen what they do in the streets. When they're not shooting, they're throwing water bottles at people and calling them names. If you are terrifying a child or an elderly woman, or you are killing an innocent civilian who is riding in his car, isn't that terrorism?"

This statement is by an official ostensibly working with the U.S. Even worse is that incidents of contractor abuse have given America's foes yet another weapon in the war of information so critical to winning in a counterinsurgency. Much like the Abu Ghraib affair, the episode in which the civilians were killed by Blackwater employees may have been an anomaly. But it proved to be a perfect fact around which adversaries could wrap their wider propaganda.

For example, the same week that the Blackwater shooting incident occurred, radical Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr was planning the withdrawal of his coalition from the government. Instead of having to justify the act, which potentially could collapse the government and plunge the nation into civil war, he was able instead to focus his propaganda and recruiting efforts on the Blackwater episode, describing it as "a cowardly attack committed by the so-called security company against our people without any justification." As with others, he was clear to blame not merely the firm, but the wider American policy, describing how the firm had been allowed to recruit "criminals and those who have left American jails." That this part is not truthful misses the point; the episode gave the other side a factual point on which to leverage their wider propaganda operations.

The effort in Iraq is just one theater within a larger effort against extremist forces, in which the "war of ideas" is the critical battleground. The global war on terrorism is not a traditional military conflict made up of set-piece battles, but rather made up of a series of small wars and insurgencies in places ranging from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Egypt, where the U.S. must sway a broader population from hostility to support if it ever wants to oust terror cells and shut down recruiting pipelines. As the newly revised foreword to the famous U.S. Marine Corps Small Wars manual notes, "Small wars are battles of ideas and battles for the perceptions and attitudes of target populations." Within these wars, it is non-kinetic tools (as opposed to fielded weaponry) that make up "the fire and maneuvers of small wars. They frequently are the main effort simply because of the criticality of the functions they perform."

Unfortunately, here again contractors have proven to be a drag on efforts to explain and justify the already highly unpopular U.S. effort in Iraq.

The Blackwater episode resonated negatively not merely inside Iraq, but throughout the Muslim world. Every single media source led with the episode in the days that followed, focusing on how the U.S. could hire such "arrogant trigger-happy guns for hire, mercenaries by any other name," as UAE-based Gulf News put it. The Al-Jazeera satellite news channel reported on the U.S. hired contractors as "An army that seeks fame, fortune, and thrill, away from all considerations and ethics of military honour ... The employees are known for their roughness. They are famous for shooting indiscriminately at vehicles or pedestrians who get close to their convoys." In the leading newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Fahmy Howeydi, one of the most influential commentators in the entire Arab world, compared Blackwater "mercenaries" to al-Qaida, coming to Iraq's chaos to seek their fortunes. Even the Daily Star, which is a regional English-language newspaper considered the most moderate voice in the region, wrote how "At least irregular formations like the Mehdi Army [Sadr's militia] can plausibly claim to be defending their communities. No foreign mercenary can plead similar motivation, so all of them should go."

What is telling about this episode is not merely the reaction in the press, but also how the contractor responded after the news broke. At a time when America's image was getting pummeled because of its employees' actions, Blackwater shut down its Web site and declined all interviews. Then a spokesperson in North Carolina issued a two-paragraph statement via e-mail, only targeted at a U.S. audience. It claimed that "The 'civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies." The firm then brought its Web site back online, without even this new statement posted, as if nothing had happened. It continued to not to take any press calls. You could, however, continue to buy Blackwater apparel on the Web site, ranging from baseball caps to baby clothes.

Next page: How Blackwater actions derailed both Condoleezza Rice and President Bush