In (Grudging) Defense of Blackwater

I am really conflicted about this whole mess with Blackwater. As a center-left Democrat, the idea of a private military corporation spawned with Republican seed money whose owner (and his family) chuck hundreds of thousands of dollars to the likes of Gary Bauer and Ralph Reed, is sickening. On the other hand, if you put Erik Prince's personal politics aside, what he's done is pretty damn impressive.

He took his family's money (his dad made billions in the lighted car mirror industry, I guess?) and set up a little security training company in a North Carolina swamp with his buddies from the SEALs. Post-9/11, the U.S. government needed a lot of people protected by experienced folks but didn't have the resources to do it in all war zones, all the time. So Blackwater got the $27 million contract to protect Paul Bremer. (Based on the job he did, I think Bremer deserved the protection of mall rent-a-cops, but that's just me.) And it went from there.

Anyway, I looked at the New York Times' coverage of the attack on the Polish ambassador to Iraq on Thursday, after all of this stuff was coming to a head. Democrats in Congress were declaring how Blackwater wasn't accountable, they were out of control, and they needed to be reigned in. And then I saw this NYT article.

Take a look at the first picture. The guys in the black helmets are Polish troopers. The dude with the bandaged face is clearly the ambassador. And the guys in the back are U.S. Army soldiers. So who's the helicopter pilot guy in the blue t-shirt? Was it Casual Thursday at the local firebase? No. That's a Blackwater pilot. The Polish ambassador's evacuation was set up, carried out and protected by Blackwater.

With Congress calling for fewer and fewer troops in Iraq, leading to an eventual pullout, the U.S. military very well might not have had the personnel available to get the Polish ambassador out in the first place. And when Congressional delegations come to Iraq, as Erik Prince politely pointed out in his written testimony, who protects them? It's not the U.S. military. It's Blackwater. Apparently Congress doesn't trust Mr. Prince to safeguard Iraqi innocent Iraqi lives, but they sure as hell trust him to safeguard their own.

More accountability is a good thing. Jesus, even Prince supports the bill that Congress passed tightening accountability on private contractors. But using Blackwater as an example of the Bush administration's mismanagement of Iraq and claiming that it's some kind of rogue mercenary army is crap. They've completed thousands of successful protective missions where they've never fired their weapons. One mismanaged incident where civilians were needlessly killed- while undeniably horrible- does not constitute proof of systemic private-sector mayhem.

And while the Department of State is the client who's been taking the heat, I know for a fact that they're not the only federal agency with whom Blackwater contracts. You better believe that those other agencies aren't just letting Blackwater run loose for the fun of it.

Look, Iraq was a bad idea. Staying there for any real period of time remains a bad idea. But since Bush has put us there, the U.S. government needs certain short- and medium-term capabilities that they can't get from the current system. The Diplomatic Security Service doesn't have anywhere near enough agents to meet the demand, but you can't just hire a bunch of them overnight- let alone fire them all once we finally get the hell out. Contractors, like it or not, meet a need.

Yeah, I know. I excoriated private contractors in the last post. I remember. But unlike the domestic need for experienced civil servants, or Customs & Border Protection officers, DSS probably won't need the volume of personnel that Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp provide in 2007, by 2012. Scalable provision of specialized services is where contractors, like it or not, tend to shine. And that, in part, is why it costs so much to send a Blackwater guy over to protect someone- they gotta feed, clothe, arm, transport and pay their own way over to the most dangerous place in the world, without any support from our military.

And that's what can't be argued. Blackwater, 99.9% of the time, does a really good friggin' job. You may not like Erik Prince, and you may not like his politics or what he does with his money. (I sure as hell don't.) Most thinking people now realize that the only way to salvage something worthwhile out of Iraq is diplomacy, and that's not going to happen if our diplomats aren't safe. So while Blackwater (and the other guys) should be held more accountable, it remains a question of supply and demand. These guys supply a needed service, and the current situation in Iraq creates a major demand.