Just in case you haven't been following all the interesting news coming out of Iraq and Washington, here are a few tidbits.
You may have seen the name Blackwater, in the news lately. Blackwater, USA is a private security firm in the employ of your friendly neighborhood US State Dept. They earn 90% of their revenue from your federal government; 2/3 of which is under no-bid contracts. These contract cowboys have at least 30,000 armed men on the ground in Iraq. (Some say it's closer to 100,000. Good luck finding out.) They operate with virtually no oversight and with no code of conduct. They are a shadow army, paid ten times what a US serviceman gets. Their presence allows George W. Bush to lie about troop strength and the need for more American soldiers.
Recently, the killing of eight Iraqi civilians by these "heros" caused Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to banish the company from his country. Sadly, Mr. al-Maliki was under the mistaken impression that he was in charge in Iraq. Not so. Within a week the boys of Blackwater were back on the job. So much for democracy, the rule of law and all the rest of the bilge that America appears so eager to export. Good luck winning hearts and minds when you have an army of unrestrained assains undoing any the good the American military might be doing.
The fact that we have turned this band of cut-throats loose in Iraq is a disgrace. What exactly happens to this mercenary army after Iraq? Oh, of course! What was I thinking? There is no "after Iraq".
Another item that may have escaped your notice is the pending trial of Army Spec. Jorge Sandoval. Spec. Sandoval is an American soldier who, until recently, was employed as a sniper in Iraq. Sandoval's court martial for premeditated murder arose from a practice called "baiting". It seems that the Army has created a nifty new unit called the Asymmetric Warfare Group. These creative characters issue spools of wire, metal pieces and AK-47 rounds to sharpshooters in order to induce Iraqis to betray themselves as terrorists. They leave this stuff in the road and if a local shows interest in the item, bang, another evil doer bites the dust.
If this practice isn't scary enough, consider the specifics of the case of Spec. Sandoval. To insure that the shooting of a civilian on April 27, 2007 wouldn't be questioned, he and Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley planted a coil of wire on the body. Nice, eh?
Let's be clear. Second guessing the actions of soldiers in the field is a crummy thing to do. These young men and women are in harm's way everyday. In a place where you can't tell the good guys from the bad, civilians will get shot. Spec. Sandoval should not be on trial for following orders. The person who should be in the stocks is the head of the Asymmetric Warfare Group. He should be charged in the same indictment as the commander of Abu Ghraib and the guy running the Renditions program. (Don't you just love the clever names like "Asymmetric" and "Renditions"that hide the dirty deeds?) And while we're at it, how about a subpoena for Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld?
War doesn't excuse everything. You can't start a civil war in someone else's country and then use methods that would make Stalin blush. Americans don't snatch people off the streets of other countries. We don't torture prisoners first and let them go after we're satisfied that they don't know anything. We don't leave "bomb pieces" in the road and shoot the first dope that picks them up. If we do these things, why did we bother to depose and execute Saddam?
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