Hired Gun Fetish<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nBy PAUL KRUGMAN<\/p>\n
Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it\u2019s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we\u2019ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.<\/p>\n
Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming \u2014 giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take \u2014 went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.<\/p>\n
And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as \u201cuseless and dangerous\u201d more than four centuries ago.<\/p>\n
….<\/p>\n
Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq\u2019s Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.<\/p>\n
Iraqis aren\u2019t the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren\u2019t for the hatred such incidents engender<\/span>.<\/p>\nWhich raises the question, why are Blackwater and other mercenary outfits still playing such a big role in Iraq?<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t tell me that they are irreplaceable. The Iraq war has now gone on for four and a half years \u2014 longer than American participation in World War II. There has been plenty of time for the Bush administration to find a way to do without mercenaries, if it wanted to.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers\u2019 money to give lucrative contracts to its friends \u2014 people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization \u2014 but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9\/11.<\/p>\n
So the privatization of war \u2014 no matter how badly it works \u2014 is just part of the pattern. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Emphasis mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Krugman ia spot on, again. Hired Gun Fetish By PAUL KRUGMAN Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it\u2019s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we\u2019ve learned over the past …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}