Iraq: U.S. Troop and Mercenary Escalations

[borderpolice]

The difficulty here is that by psychologising the issues, by reducing them down to an individual's "personal" psychology and motives, all social and economic context is lost, is depoliticized.

I am not psychologised the issue. I am well aware of the social context, and have repeatedly pointed to it. what i do for analytical purpose is to distinguish the social (i.e. communication) from the psychological (inferrable via observation in others and accessible by introspection in oneself). This distinction is extremely powerful analytically.

Certainly at some abstract, rarefied level all soldiers - even conscripted ones - are mercenaries

I disagree on many levels. I would like to point out that many conscripts are forced to serve nand would be severely punished (up to a death penalty) if they refused. This has strong effects on behaviour, hence the conscript/merenary distinction is a powerful analytical tool.

but this completely ignores the actual circumstances - political, economic, institutional, etc - that lead most young people to enlist: most US/UK soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are from extremely impoverished backgrounds, many are poor immigrants, many are from ethnic minorities subject to systematic discrimination, many are from rigidly conservative social backgrounds, many - as teenagers - are subject to patriarchal family and peer pressures, many are bribed or seduced by intensive military recruitment propaganda (which is why a majority of soldiers now in Iraq want out, and it won't be long until we see the kind of desertions and mutinies that eventually occurred in Vietnam). Circumstancial necessity and imperatives led them to enlist, in stark contrast to the vast majority of mercenaries working for private military companies, who are under no such crippling pressures.

in a trivial sense you are right, one's history (together with the physical makeup) determines one's actions. Each human is -- crudely put -- a history sensitive interacting automaton. But that's just not interesting in an analysis because it is always true. The problem with such abstract analysis (based on class for example) is that it's predictive value -- in the present context , different in other contexts --is low while professional soldiers are often from the lower-income parts of society, very large numbers of lower income groups nevertheless do not become mercenaries.

In addition, essentially nobody in the UK is from "extremely impoverished backgrounds". The UK is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, and even the worst off are probably in the tow 25% of income world wide. for a start, every UK citizen has access to clean water, high-quality education, high-quality health care and so on. The majority of the world's population is less fortunate.

 

[borderpolice]

As to formal differences between regular state militaries (at least in most countries) and private mercenary companies:

I agree with all this, but it is at the supra-individual, organisational level, and hence orthogonal to the question whether a given soldier is a mercenary or not.
To be sure, this organisational level is much more important than the individual's reason for doing what they are doing.

 

[vimothy]

A good example of the stereotyping of the military:

most US/UK soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are from extremely impoverished backgrounds, many are poor immigrants, many are from ethnic minorities subject to systematic discrimination, many are from rigidly conservative social backgrounds, many - as teenagers - are subject to patriarchal family and peer pressures, many are bribed or seduced by intensive military recruitment propaganda (which is why a majority of soldiers now in Iraq want out, and it won't be long until we see the kind of desertions and mutinies that eventually occurred in Vietnam). Circumstancial necessity and imperatives led them to enlist, in stark contrast to the vast majority of mercenaries working for private military companies, who are under no such crippling pressures.

This is, although a seemingly common view, utter nonsense. The typical 18-24 year old soldier in the US is wealthier and better educated than the average 18-24 year old citizen. 98 percent of enlistees join with high school diplomas or better, whereas among civilians the rate is 75 percent. 75.8 percent of the military is white (roughly the same as the US population as a whole).

From here: http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed112905a.cfm?RenderforPrint=1

But why let the facts get in the way of your dearly held beliefs?

 

[vimothy]

Realise that pretty much everyone here is anti-war. However, you still might find this interesting. It's by Dave Kilcullen, senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Gen Petraeus in Iraq. He's a good writer, but more importantly, he knows what the MNF is trying to achieve operationally. Despite all the negative criticism of the surge ("it's failed", "it can't succeed", etc) and the media pressure to withdraw, Kilcullen states that the surge proper hasn't even started yet. "We haven’t actually started what I would call the “surge” yet. All we’ve been doing is building up forces and trying to secure the population."

Kilcullen outllines the new approach:

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain.

The focus is going to shift from chasing insurgents to protecting the population, and starving terrorists from civilian support. It seems as though the MNF is listening to much of the criticism directed at them. This reminds me of somethng William Lind might suggest. At least, it's more like something William Lind would suggest.

Now we patrol all the time, on foot, by day and night with Iraqi units normally present as partners, and the chances of getting hit are much lower on each patrol. We are finally coming out of the "defensive crouch" with which we used to approach the environment, and it is starting to pay off.

We played the enemy’s game for too long: not any more. Now it is time for him to play our game.

- http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/06/understanding-current-operatio/

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

This is, although a seemingly common view, utter nonsense. The typical 18-24 year old soldier in the US is wealthier and better educated than the average 18-24 year old citizen. 98 percent of enlistees join with high school diplomas or better, whereas among civilians the rate is 75 percent. 75.8 percent of the military is white (roughly the same as the US population as a whole).

From here: http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed112905a.cfm?RenderforPrint=1

It not being sufficient for you to disseminate all the neo-con propaganda 'justifying' an illegal war, you now wish to completely distort [with the help of one of the most right-wing lobbies on the planet - The Heritage Foundation] the widely-documented reality of why the US doesn't even need the draft (especially after its introduction during that other war in the late sixties helped bring about the end, both of the war and of the draft): because of the poverty draft: economic conscription.

Half of all recruits to Army read at level of 11-year-olds

By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, The Telegraph

A confidential study into the educational standards of soldiers has revealed that half of all new infantry recruits only have the reading and writing skills of 11-year-olds.

The study commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, which the Telegraph has seen, also discloses that a fifth of recruits have the literacy and numeracy levels of seven-year-olds. Four per cent are at the standard of the average five-year-old.​

Not only does the US target the poorest rural areas for most of its 'recruits' and also predominantly black urban areas, it goes to much further lengths, blackmailing those who are not even US citizens, from Puerto Ricans to 'illegal immigrants'.

To take a very simple and publicly documented specific example of how the contemporary administration-orchestrated US military machine routinely goes about recruiting its expendable, powerless cannon fodder: Puerto Rico (and an excellent example of how the US uses its empire of hundreds of foreign military bases for recruitment purposes). Still one of the poorest countries - by US design - in the world [despite having been violently annexed by the US long ago] where a massive 3,000 youths are forcibly "recruited" into the US armed forces every year, making Puerto Rico, a subjugated US colony with a total population of just 3.6 million, a tiny realm generating more military recruitment than any U.S. state, as well as being one of the most heavily US-militarised areas on the planet, for long-standing "reasons of state" vis-a-vis US foreign colonialist and neo-liberal corporatist policy in Central and South America.

Despite being denied either full United States citizenship [Puerto Ricans were not granted the "privilege" of voting for Bush or Kerry in November, 2004, for instance] or the right to full independence and self-determining political democracy, Puerto Ricans have been subject to conscription into the U.S. military and they have suffered massively disproportionate casualties in U.S. wars. Two hundred thousand Puerto Ricans served in the U.S. military during the 20th century (including World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam). And these numbers do not even include the more than two million Puerto Ricans living in the United States who have served, or Puerto Rican troops who took part in U.S. military actions in Panama, Grenada and other Hollywood-exotic military playgrounds in the more recent past.

Some 348 Puerto Rican troops were killed in World War I, 743 were killed in Korea, and 1,300 died in Indochina. 17,855 Puerto Ricans served in the First World War. It has been estimated that 52% of the Puerto Rican troops who returned from the Vietnam War experienced some form of social or mental dis-functional problems as a result of war-related trauma.

Today, Puerto Rico is a glaring example of economic conscription, which primarily targets youth of colour from low-income areas, urban and rural [as well as, in poorer regions of US states, the likes of economically-compromised "white trash" Jessica Lynch and her now depraved-to-order female photo-opportunity compatriots so prominently featured in the Abu Ghraib unknowing snuff movie, "Iraqi holiday snapshots" montage, the military now preferring females (and indeed, males) from low-income areas in the US in combination with the requisite "psychologically androgynous" personality profile, as the personnel manuals penned by military shrinks now specify, oblivious to their own depraved cultural constructs]. With unemployment over twice the U.S. average and chronically-low non-unionised wages, the island of Puerto Rico is fertile ground for the military's deceptive recruiting practices and seductive propaganda campaigns. Again, some three thousand young Puerto Ricans are recruited into the armed forces of the US each year, qualifying Puerto Rico as the largest single source of US military recruitment in the entire world. According to the Army Times, "The San Juan and Aguadilla [recruiting] companies averaged nearly 900 Regular Army and Army Reserve recruits in 1998, and nearly 800 in 1997." To offer perspective, the average annual intake for the Army's other recruiting companies was half of these totals.

... and then there's that other carefully media-censored scandal of both US Green Card holders and undocumented immigrants blackmailed into signing on to the military-recruitment dotted line, or face the deportation frog-march.

Interestingly, its now almost a truism that the first conscientious objectors [or AWOLs or deserters] in any war, illegal or immoral, are those forced to fight other people's wars, as with Camilo Mejia, a Costa Rican, a few years ago [May, 2004]:

Camilo Mejia Goes to Prison for His Stance Against the War in Iraq, While a Campaign to Free Camilo Begins

"The American soldier who tortured Iraqi prisoners was sentenced to one year in prison and my son, who denounced these abuses and followed his conscience, was also sentenced to one year in prison. Is that fair? Is that just?"

""What an incredible irony that we're prosecuting soldiers in Iraq for violations of international law and we're prosecuting a soldier here because he refused to do the same things," said former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a member of Camilo's defense team."​

 

[vimothy]

It not being sufficient for you to disseminate all the neo-con propaganda 'justifying' an illegal war, you now wish to completely distort [with the help of one of the most right-wing lobbies on the planet - The Heritage Foundation] the widely-documented reality of why the US doesn't even need the draft (especially after its introduction during that other war in the late sixties helped bring about the end, both of the war and of the draft): because of the poverty draft: economic conscription.

Whatever your opinions of the Heritage Foundation (simply being "right-wing" doesn't mean your research is worthless), at least it based its report on empirical findings.

Half of all recruits to Army read at level of 11-year-olds

By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, The Telegraph

A confidential study into the educational standards of soldiers has revealed that half of all new infantry recruits only have the reading and writing skills of 11-year-olds.

The study commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, which the Telegraph has seen, also discloses that a fifth of recruits have the literacy and numeracy levels of seven-year-olds. Four per cent are at the standard of the average five-year-old.​

This article refers to UK Armed Forces. I was referring to US Armed Forces.

Not only does the US target the poorest rural areas for most of its 'recruits' and also predominantly black urban areas, it goes to much further lengths, blackmailing those who are not even US citizens, from Puerto Ricans to 'illegal immigrants'.

Read the report.

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

Whatever your opinions of the Heritage Foundation (simply being "right-wing" doesn't mean your research is worthless), at least it based its report on empirical findings.

It 'based' its 'findings' on fascist military propaganda.

This article refers to UK Armed Forces. I was referring to US Armed Forces.

The situation is much worse in the US.

Read the report.

"And to make claims about the nature of U.S. troops to discredit their mission ought to be politically out of bounds."

The Heritage Foundation

The most powerful and influencial lobby group (right-wing 'think tank') in the US, with assets running into hundreds of millions, the Heritage Foundation, established in the early 1970s, is to the extreme right even of George Bush, openly pursuing fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic, and Creationist agendas, with a foreign policy that is more disturbing than that of the neo-con Project For A New American Century. It is largely funded by a combination of conservative multinationals, wealthy loonies, and dubious foreign governments.


“The Heritage Foundation will continue to be a key element in the phalanx of rightist groups with an agenda of austerity for the poor, hostility to minorities and women, upward distribution of wealth for the rich, economic domination of the Third World, with repression and bloodletting for those who rebel.”
– Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection, 1991

In 1980, Heritage published a 1,077-page book called Mandate for Leadership, which contained 2000 policy recommendations. It was presented to Attorney General Ed Meese a week after Reagan’s election. Meese was quoted as saying that “the Reagan Administration will rely heavily on the Heritage Foundation.” These recommendations included: rollback of minority programs, dramatic increase in military spending, and cutting taxes. In 1985 Heritage claimed that the Reagan administration’s policy reflected 60 to 65 percent of their policy measures. Heritage publishes a new edition every four years for subsequent administrations.

Rebecca Hagelin, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, attacked “the tentacles of radical feminist thought” that she claims are “poisoning the image” of white males through the media and Title IX sports programs. “The white, Anglo-Saxon male, the young teenage guy, is probably the most discriminated against kid on the face of the earth right now,” she declared on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's just as well most Iraqis don't drink, as it would appear the occupying US forces would encounter severe logistical difficulties in organising a piss-up in a brewery...

 

[Gavin]

Do mercenary killings of Iraqi civilians count for the U.S. forces or criminal activity? Or do they count at all?

The State department's mercenary bodyguards in trouble -- even puppet Maliki had some harsh words followed by... well, nothing of course, that's his job, one that hopefully he will not have much longer. State department unable to get anyone to fill up the positions in the U.S. embassy in Iraq: "You know that at any other (country) in the world, the embassy would be closed at this point," Crotty said to loud and sustained applause from the about 300 diplomats who attended the meeting in a large State Department auditorium. Blackwater still prowls the streets.

Mercenaries now make up more than half of the occupation forces (wikipedia says 182,000 contractors to 177,000 coalition troops). Removing the largest supplier of these hired killers would deal the occupation a blow it would not be able to recover from, and as such the Bush administration would never allow it to happen. But could it be done? There are indicators that Blackwater may have made itself a target of resistance attacks (although... their preferred method of protection is intimidation through violence -- "Don't fuck with us, we'll gun down your city block" -- no doubt why they've repeatedly engaged in the killing of unarmed civilians, and I can see why most Iraqis would do everything they can to stay out of their way) .

Could the removal of Blackwater end the occupation, or at least scale it back substantially? Should this be a major activist focus?

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

The whole point of privatization, of course, is to remove all public accountability and transparancy.

What's incredible at the moment is that, as huge public sums are poured into such state-privatized terrorist corporations like Blackwater, the corresponding state ones (like the Pentagon) are forced to compete with their private counterparts by allocating even larger public sums to their own elite terrorist specialists (Navy Seals, Green Berets, etc) in order to hold on to them: Pentagon Offers Huge Bonuses to Hold Onto Top Warriors - The Pentagon's Special Operations Command is paying reenlistment bonuses of up to $150,000 to Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs to keep them from fleeing the military to take high-paying jobs with private security contractors such as Blackwater USA.

The on-going US-Iraq power tuffle over the status of these highly-paid state-privatized terrorists is equally sickening:

On the one hand, the Iraq cabinet okays law to end foreign firms' immunity : Iraq's cabinet approved a draft law on Tuesday that would end the immunity from prosecution of foreign security contractors by scrapping a decree that Iraqis have complained amounts to a "license to kill." This, as simultaneously, the Blackwater guards are given immunity by US in Iraq shootings: State Department investigators gave deal for testimony. While all the foregoing is then simply reported as an 'embarrassment' to the US: Reports of Blackwater immunity deal embarrass Rice - Reports that State Department investigators offered immunity deals to security guards accused of shooting dead 17 Iraqis dealt an embarrassing blow to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday.

So yes, Blackwater (as with the others, the British ones too, one of which oversees them all - discussed previously here, now with hundred of millions in new US funding) is a criminal-terrorist gang of mass murderers masquerading as a 'security corporation' that is entirely funded by brain-dead American taxpayers. So what should activists do, apart from pursuing them as wanted mass murderers?

 

[Guybrush]

I very much agree with your descriptions, and I wonder how benevolently people would view these guys if they were paramilitary troops operating in some South-American banana republic, hired by the local junta as ‘security personnel’. Or to use a more salient example, during the Salvadoran civil war, were the death squads that roamed the land viewed similarly by the people that were nominally on their side of the conflict and in the West (that is, as offal), or did the former view them as security forces? Do-gooders defamed by an inappreciative world, perhaps?

 

[zhao]

 

[adruu]

I think we would be very very wrong if we didn't think the "Salvadoran option" wasn't and always will be the guiding paradigm of imperial involvement in other countries. There really is no difference in between salvador and iraq from the perspective of the top-down planners.

 

[Gavin]

There really is no difference in between salvador and iraq from the perspective of the top-down planners.

Or New Orleans. I am afraid of what happens when (if?) the U.S. recalls the mercenaries and they say no.

 

[nomadologist]

I wish they'd reinstate the draft. If they did, those who were so willing to send someone else's kids to Iraq, and every frat boy and numbskull of-age boy/man who voted Bush into the oval office, would advocate pulling out immediately.

It's interesting to me how many highly decorated officers and generals have been speaking out against the war for so long. Here's an article from last year:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0414/p01s03-usmi.html

Has this ever happened before? I don't remember this happening during the Gulf War...

 

[adruu]

Sign up! Do your civic duty!

www.civiliancontractorjobs.com/
www.tacticalforums.com
www.socnetcentral.com
www.secureaspects.com
www.getoffthex.com
www.lightfighter.net

 

[vimothy]

Do mercenary killings of Iraqi civilians count for the U.S. forces or criminal activity? Or do they count at all?

In IBC data, they count towards "US-led forces" casualties, as do Iraqi AF and the police force.

Mercenaries now make up more than half of the occupation forces (wikipedia says 182,000 contractors to 177,000 coalition troops). Removing the largest supplier of these hired killers would deal the occupation a blow it would not be able to recover from, and as such the Bush administration would never allow it to happen. But could it be done? There are indicators that Blackwater may have made itself a target of resistance attacks (although... their preferred method of protection is intimidation through violence -- "Don't fuck with us, we'll gun down your city block" -- no doubt why they've repeatedly engaged in the killing of unarmed civilians, and I can see why most Iraqis would do everything they can to stay out of their way) .

But they're not an undifferentiated mass, Gavin. Of those 182,000 contractor employees, which you describe as providing "half of the occupation forces", nearly 120,00 are actually Iraqis (from here). The actual number of trigger pullers is, like the ratio of US combat to support staff, much smaller (somewhere in the region of 20,000, I think. I'm still searching for reliable sources).

Could the removal of Blackwater end the occupation, or at least scale it back substantially? Should this be a major activist focus?

It could certainly increase the security deficit to even greater levels, possibly even intolerable ones, and so collapse the government.

 

[Guybrush]

Vimothy, do you have any good info on why, and to which extent, the ‘surge’ is working? (I’m not being facetious!)

 

[vimothy]

Vimothy, do you have any good info on why, and to which extent, the ‘surge’ is working? (I’m not being facetious!)

Depends what you are after, Mr Brush. And it also, I suppose, depends what you mean by "working". There are a lot of good pieces written by members of Petraeus' leadership team on the internet outlining the methodology and rational. I can certainly point you to good military and ex-millitary writers giving their opinions, though these are by no means limited to explaining why the surge is working - there is as much criticism of it from these quarters.

 

[Guybrush]

But that’s what I’m looking for! Obviously, the more pedagogic the better, but I’m up for anything.