GLIMPSE OF STATELESS WAR IN IRAQ

Look at the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad, and you may catch a glimpse of the future . Two sides are fight­ing there. But, for brief moments, this has become a war with­out a state. And it could be the first of many to come.
On the ground in Iraq right now, there are about 20,000 pri­vate mil­i­tary con­trac­tors maybe more, no one really knows for sure. They’re han­dling a huge swath of tasks, from secu­rity to logis­tics, for coali­tion mil­i­taries and other com­pa­nies. But their ties to the American gov­ern­ment are neb­u­lous, at best.
Opposing these mer­ce­nar­ies in Iraq are thou­sands of insur­gents. They may have loy­al­ties to a cleric or tribal leader or fallen regime. But they have few con­nec­tions to any gov­ern­ment cur­rently oper­at­ing. And Iraq isn’t the only place where we’re see­ing state­less adver­saries of the U.S. oper­ate. As many observers have noted recently, Al Qaeda seems to be get­ting along just swim­mingly, with­out a home state.
Of course, there are sev­eral gov­ern­ments’ troops cur­rently mixed up in this Iraq fight, too. The mili­tias and mer­ce­nar­ies have clashed directly in only a few instances. The con­trac­tors have mostly served in a sup­port role to the offi­cial mil­i­taries. But it’s not to hard to imag­ine a bat­tle down the road in which states are all but removed from the equa­tion.
Taking on nests of state­less ter­ror­ists or drug-​​dealers, a gov­ern­ment might not want to put its offi­cial boots on the ground. An army-​​for-​​hire, with lim­ited lead­er­ship from the reg­u­lar mil­i­tary, might be the cleaner solu­tion. There are no offi­cial bud­gets to approve. No Congressional com­mit­tees to clear. No testy allies to con­sult. No weep­ing fam­i­lies of guard and reserve units to con­sole, as their spouses and par­ents and chil­dren are taken off the war. And no flag-​​draped cas­kets to carry home.
In fact, argues Corporate Warriors author Peter Singer in an upcom­ing Salon arti­cle, such a future is under­way, in fits and starts, right now:

When a CIA plane mis­tak­enly coor­di­nated the shoot­down of a plane­load American mis­sion­ar­ies over Peru in 2001, few real­ized that the plane was actu­ally manned by con­trac­tors for Aviation Development Corporation, based in Alabama. When sui­cide bombers attacked an American com­pound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last spring, few under­stood what it meant that the tar­gets worked for Vinnell Corp., a Fairfax, Virginia-​​based defense con­trac­tor that trains Saudi Arabia’s and Iraqs army. When Palestinian mil­i­tants killed three Americans in Gaza last fall, most didnt real­ize that they were pri­vate mil­i­tary con­trac­tors work­ing for DynCorp, a mul­ti­fac­eted gov­ern­ment ser­vices firm, based just out­side the Washington-​​Dulles airport.

This state­less future would be a return to the past, Singer notes. Before the 20th Century, pri­vate armies were as com­mon as government-​​backed mil­i­taries maybe more so. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all used arrows-​​for-​​hire. “Contract armies fight­ing con­tract armies, led by con­tract gen­er­als,” is how Singer describes the Thirty Years War (1618–1648).
By 1782, the British East India Company had a cor­po­rate force 100,000 men strong much larger than the army of the Queen. The Dutch East India Company’s 140-​​ship navy, sim­i­larly, dwarfed its government’s fleet.
The pri­vate com­pa­nies some­times clashed with states’ armies. But often, they fought with groups that had lit­tle ties to any gov­ern­ment “tribes, pirates, and each other,” accord­ing to Singer.
Now, in Iraq, things are start­ing to come full cir­cle. Private com­pa­nies are once again tan­gling with tribal and reli­gious mili­tias, who belong to no state. “You have con­trac­tors mak­ing up a division’s worth of troops, and tak­ing a division’s worth of casu­al­ties,” Signer says.
And that raises an array of trou­bling ques­tions, Phil Carter notes in a recent Slate essay. How can these state­less groups be held to the laws of war? How can they be held account­able to the pub­lic, or to a government’s mil­i­tary stan­dards? And what hap­pens if they decide that a par­tic­u­lar fight is no longer good for the tribe or for the bot­tom line?
The answers will begin to take shape in Najaf and Karballah and Kirkuk.
As Singer writes, “Iraq is not just the largest pri­vate mil­i­tary mar­ket in mod­ern his­tory, but also a test­ing ground for just how far the out­sourc­ing trend will play out.“
THERE’S MORE: Captain’s Quarters has a fas­ci­nat­ing account from a Special Forces vet­eran who’s now work­ing as a pri­vate mil­i­tary con­trac­tor in Iraq.

April 14th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.