Saturday Extra

How will the US deal with the increasingly out of control private military contractors in Iraq?

The issue of the killing of 17 Iraqis by Blackwater security contractors is currently before a grand jury.

But the potential prosecution of the Blackwater contractors is not the only issue in the developing saga of a company which has been accused of damaging the US's counterinsurgency strategy.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: By now, most of us are aware of the terrible September incident in Iraq, where 17 Iraqis were shot dead by contractors from the US company, Blackwater. And the incident was not the first cause for alarm involving private military firms; it probably was the most extreme.

The list of concerns is now a mile long, and it's become very murky. Above all, it brings into sharp focus this whole, very new way of doing war, exemplified in Iraq, with parallel forces, publicly funded forces, and private firms, it's a profound development.

Well a US Justice Department matter brought before a Grand Jury this week, will decide whether prosecutors have a case against the Blackwater contractors who opened fire in the Baghdad traffic circle, allegedly without any provocation. And the outcome may affect far more than the contractors and the company involved. I'm joined now by one of the foremost experts on the issue of private military firms, Peter W. Singer. He's a Senior Fellow with the non-profit independent Washington think-tank, the Brookings Institution. Welcome to the program, Peter.

Peter W. Singer: Thank you for having me.

Geraldine Doogue: Look, before we discuss the wider issues of private military companies in the first place, could we just touch on what's emerged this week, firstly in relation to the Grand Jury hearing, and secondly, a civil lawsuit brought against Blackwater. So to try to distinguish between the two. What's the US Justice Department attempting to do by putting this matter before a Grand Jury?

Peter W. Singer: Well I think the real question is why have they waited so long to do anything. They are now finally kicking into action on trying to create some sort of accountability for crimes that may have been committed by private military contractors in Iraq. Now the challenge for them is that gathering evidence 9,000 miles away in the middle of a war zone is going to be quite difficult. But if it does come through, it certainly creates a new consequence for any kind of bad action that happens out there. The lawsuit though may shape the industry even more than any kind of prosecutions because the lawsuit -

Geraldine Doogue: This is the civil lawsuit, do you mean?

Peter W. Singer: Yes. What's happened is that you have multiple lawsuits been filed by Iraqis against US private military companies alleging that the Iraqis were harmed by them, and the lawsuits are in US courts. And if they go through, what you'll see is that it'll change the cost of doing business for these contractors because now not only do they have to pay a premium to private soldiers to get them out there to fight for them, but also now they have to worry about multi-million dollar payments in lawsuits. And so the insurance costs will certainly change the industry that way. So these are two things to really keep our eye on. The third, that no-one's talking about, that I think is maybe as important, is you have an attitude shift that's really coming to the fore in the US military, where there is a sense that these contractors have now started to harm the operation more than they've helped. And you've just seen a lot of institutional voices within the military speaking out against the use of these contractors.

Geraldine Doogue: I want to come back to that, because I do think that's a very interesting development, and I might add, we're talking about 160,000 aren't we. In your recent article in salon.com I was absolutely gobsmacked at the numbers there which is about - well it's more, isn't it, than the regular forces?

Peter W. Singer: It's actually just about the same number as the regular forces in Iraq, and what we joke about it is that we don't have, as what President Bush said, a coalition of the willing in Iraq, we actually have a coalition of the billing if we're being honest about it.

Geraldine Doogue: OK, so just to go back for that moment. So at the moment is there no US law that's been tested that covers these people operating on US behalf in a foreign country?

Peter W. Singer: There are a variety of laws, but you have two problems here. One is that the laws weren't designed for armed civilians operating in a war zone 9,000 miles away, they just weren't structured for that. So for example???, the law that the Justice Department is going to try and use, is basically one that says if you commit a felony abroad, working for the US, we might try and prosecute you back home, but again, it's going to be very difficult. The other part of this is just the political will to run these things down, and that's been absent for the last several years. And then it gets even more complex when you talk about different nationalities, because those 160,000 that are operating, Americans don't even make up the majority of them. You have over 30 different nationalities, and they range from local Iraqis who are working for these private firms, you have folks from Australia and New Zealand, the UK, Chile, Nepal, you name it, and so it's another layer of complication, and then add one more: they're not all working on behalf of the US government, they're working on behalf of companies who've hired these private military firms, non-governmental organisations that range from media groups to even we found one humanitarian organisation that had hired its own sniper team.

Geraldine Doogue: Goodness. So the civil lawsuit has been accepted, has it, in the United States? These Iraqis can legitimately bring a civil lawsuit in the United States against a United States company?

Peter W. Singer: So far it's still working its way through the courts. The very first one of these is actually against the company that hired contractors at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and a judge recently ruled that that lawsuit can proceed. So then they'll get to the merits of it as to whether bad things happen or not, etc., but he's ruled it can proceed so far. Now of course we can expect that the company will post test that and we might even see some of these cases end up in our Supreme Court. And who knows what happens then. But it's definitely a change in the industry from where it was such as Australia's first contact with it, which was back in '97 with the Sandline episode in Papua-New Guinea, and it's certainly a much different industry now than it was then.

Geraldine Doogue: This isn't the only dubious matter that Blackwater's been caught up in, is it? On Christmas Eve last year, a contractor inside the Green Zone got drunk and began an argument with an official guarding the Iraqi Vice-President. The contractor shot dead the guard, and he was flown back to the US and never charged. Now this seemed a bit staggering, really, particularly as you point out if the situation was reversed, and it happened to a man guarding US Vice President Cheney, so again it's indicating a particular cast of mind I suppose. Or maybe this industry is so new it's just run way ahead of people's capacity to cope, legally.

Peter W. Singer: My own sense is that it's grown too fast and gone too far. A way to think about this is it's almost like a steroid addiction in terms of our military policy. It's allowed us to do things that we wouldn't normally be able to do. It's allowed us to send 160,000 more troops than we've been able to???. It's allowed policymakers to dodge some of the hard choices that go into engaging in a war. They've avoided some of the political consequences of it. But just like that steroid addiction, it may allow you to do more but it also has a lot of bad effects that actually at the end of the day may be more harmful. And that's where the military officers are coming down on this right now. You know what, these contractors are out there, they're doing a range of critical roles, maybe too critical roles. But the effect of it is still a negative, and when you have contractors out there engaging in these kind of incidents, like the Christmas Eve shooting that you described, or there were joy-ride shootings of civilians, Abu Ghraib, or of course the recent shooting in Baghdad. These kind of incidents basically undermine your efforts to win hearts and minds on the ground, but they actually harm your effort to win. And they really destroy you in the broader war of ideas that's out there. And then there's another part of this is that they actually go against all the best lessons of counterinsurgency, the new commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus has tried to put into place. And so it's been a body blow to the operation, and that's where they're starting to question it.

Geraldine Doogue: I just want you to develop that idea that you alluded to, that this has often been dreamed up for political purposes. What do you mean by that?

Peter W. Singer: In terms of avoiding some of the cost?

Geraldine Doogue: No, I suppose the whole notion you introduce in your article, that actually this is a political solution. I suppose I saw private firms as being fundamentally about reducing the cost and maintaining the large -

Peter W. Singer: It's interesting. People always talk about private firms in the financial sense, and often the question that folks in our Congress, for example, will ask is 'Does it save us money?' and the reality is that it's never been about that. It's been about avoiding not financial cost but political cost. And the way to think about this is what would we have done if we hadn't had this option of private militaries? Well, we would have had to have sent more troops to Iraq, maybe 100,000 more troops to Iraq. Well that certainly would have changed the discussion and debate in America about whether to engage in this invasion or not. Another option which was the rule that used to hold was this called the Ablamas Doctrine, and it basically said that if America was going to get in a major war, we had to call up our reserve of National Guard, so that the homeland would be engaged in this war. Well contractors was a way of avoiding that. Same thing in terms of persuading your friends and allies to come along with you, like we did in the Balkans and in Afghanistan. Well we weren't able to do that fully in Iraq, but private contractors backfilled for that.

And then the final part of this is the true nature of the cost: casualties. We've had more than 1,000 contractors killed in Iraq, more than 13,000 wounded. We have several that are still POWs, and yet we don't talk about them. And there's one statistic that I think is amazing, which is this: with all the press reports from Iraq, one half of one percent talk about contractors.

Geraldine Doogue: Peter, we're coming up to the News. It's a very interesting story. Thank you so much.

Peter W. Singer from the Brookings Institution.

Guests

Peter W Singer
Director, 21st Century Defense Initiative
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy
Brookings Institution

Story Researcher and Producer

Jo Jarvis