The New York Times has an extensive report on the scope, costs and problems of the military's use of
mercenaries in Iraq.
With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias -- by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000...
The price of this partnership is soaring. By some recent government estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18 billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants, electric lines and oil refineries...
The authority initially estimated that security costs would eat up about 10 percent of the $18 billion in reconstruction money approved by Congress, said Capt. Bruce A. Cole of the Navy, a spokesman for the authority's program management office.
But after months of sabotage and insurgency, some officials now say a much higher percentage will go to security companies that unblushingly charge $500 to $1,500 a day for their most skilled operators...
But some military leaders are openly grumbling that the lure of $500 to $1,500 a day is siphoning away some of their most experienced Special Operations people at the very time their services are most in demand...
For more than a decade, military colleges have produced study after study warning of the potential pitfalls of giving contractors too large a role on the battlefield. The claimed cost savings are exaggerated or illusory, the studies argue. Questions of coordination and oversight have not been adequately resolved. Troops could be put at risk...
That the boondoggle in Baghdad is generally considered the work of the neocons shows how the term "neoconservatism" now denotes something close to the complete opposite of its original meaning. Early on, in the late 1960's, the term was used to describe the positions of liberal social scientists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer who were chastened by what they believed was the over-reach of the New Society and grew skeptical of government's ability to enact sweeping progressive changes on society. According to another prominent domestic policy neocon, the highly respected political scientist James Q. Wilson,
"Neoconservatism is an ... attitude that holds social reality to be complex and change difficult. If there is any article of faith common to almost every adherent, it is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Things never work out quite as you hope; in particular, government programs often do not achieve their objectives or do achieve them but with high or unexpected costs. ... [A] neoconservative questions change because, though present circumstances are bad and something ought to be done, it is necessary to do that something cautiously, experimentally, and with a minimum of bureaucratic authority."
Like so much of what's happening in Iraq, using mercenaries has led to unintended consequences, such as running up the cost of the project and draining the special forces that are the foundation of Rumsfeld's "revolution in military affairs." When neoconservatism comes to mean the combination of Paul Wolfowitz' utopian and Straussian fantasies of remaking the Middle East and the free-market fetishism of privatization proselytized by Grover Norquist, implemented by an anti-intellectual President who expects to be taken in the rapture before the apocalypse, you have to wonder if the term neoconservatism retains any precise or useful meaning.