Shocking news from the Washington Post
The subtitle to this front page story in the Washington Post about private security companies in Iraq reads: "Despite Shootings, Security Companies Expanded Presence." While this statement may not be as clueless as the infamous piece that wondered why crime was decreasing as the prison population was increasing, the genre is the same. In other words, it's not necessarily paradoxical that the violence which caused American security contractors to shoot people in Iraq would prompt an increase in the presence of those contractors. In hindsight, one can say that this violence should perhaps have prompted an increase in military personnel, as well.
It's possible, of course, that the security contractors frequently were shooting people for no good reason, in which case bringing more of them in would have been an unambiguously bad idea.. However, the Post's story, by Steve Fainaru, provides no evidence that this ever occurred. Instead, Fainaru is content to show that contractors, and specifically Blackwater, were hated by Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which (as he says) was dominated by Shia militias. But that’s not necessarily a damning piece of information, as the Post's own coverage of these institutions should demonstrate.
The Post also shows that some American counter-insurgency officials, charged with winning Iraqi “hearts and minds,” were frustrated by their lack of control over the actions of Blackwater and other contractors. It’s easy to see how some tension could exist between certain aggressive approaches to security, whether by private contractors or the military itself, and efforts to create good-will towards Americans. It’s also easy to see why the military would want the approach to this potential trade-off by other Americans using force in Iraq to mirror its own. On the other hand, the security mission of those who brought in the contractors (protecting the security of American civilian personal) did not precisely mirror that of the military. And during the wild and woolly days of 2005 and 2006, when, as the Post pointed out on virtually a daily basis, the military mission was not succeeding and (presumably for that reason) hearts and minds were not being won, a hyper-aggressive approach to protecting American civilians may have had considerable merit.
But context has never been a strong point of the Post. Neither, it seems, is sub-headline writing.
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