GUNS-​​FOR-​​HIRE TO POLICE IRAQ?

The U.S. may turn to a pri­vate secu­rity force to guard as many as 2,000 key sites in Iraq, the New York Times reports.
The idea, cur­rently being floated “at the high­est lev­els of the Pentagon,” is to re-​​hire for­mer Iraqi sol­diers, and to retrain them to guard the National Museum and other loca­tions.
“Our sense is that the mil­i­tary has too much on their plate right now, and that these are issues that need to be addressed, and the way to do that is through the pri­vate sec­tor,” Anne Tiedemann, an exec­u­tive at the secu­rity firm Kroll Inc., told the Times.
Guns-​​for-​​hire are becom­ing an increas­ingly attrac­tive option for U.S. policy-​​makers. They’re being used cur­rently to spot drug-​​growers and rebels in Colombia. And, as dis­cussed a few weeks ago, they’re being con­sid­ered for peace-​​keeping duties in the Congo.
THERE’S MORE: Peter Singer — author of the recently-​​published Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry — calls the pri­va­tized police idea “another checker player’s move in a game of chess.“
“Now we have a sit­u­a­tion where the new Iraqi army, new Iraqi police force and now new Iraqi para­mil­i­tary force will all be assem­bled by the pri­vate mar­ket,” he tells Defense Tech.
That’s in addi­tion to all of the other func­tions con­trac­tors are fill­ing in Iraq. By some esti­mates, the ratio of pri­vate employ­ees to U.S. sol­diers oper­at­ing in the Persian Gulf area is one-​​to-​​ten.
The lurch towards an out­sourced police force, Singer notes, is an indi­ca­tor of “how lit­tle plan­ning the admin­is­tra­tion gave to the post-​​conflict stage (‘don’t know what to do, just give it to some­one else to do’).“
He adds, “How can you think that cre­at­ing a new, pri­vate, para­mil­i­tary force (hired and fired by out­siders) will not cause prob­lems with the other forces and not under­mine the author­ity of the pub­lic Iraqi admin­is­tra­tion we are sup­posed to be set­ting up?”

July 18th, 2003 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.