Lately I've been thinking a little bit about the use of lethal force. The thought process starts with the use of "contractors" in Iraq. For quite a while I haven't understood why in the midst of this invasion and occupation we've chosen to fill any roles at all with non-military personnel. All the happy go lucky TV shows about WWII always show security, construction, transportation, and hospitality being carried out by military outfits. Really the only thing I can think of that wasn't that way would be entertainment - the USO. This I guess was part of the big Rumsfeld reorganization of the Pentagon, taking anything not central to the mission and outsourcing it.
In principle I guess I can get behind a lot of that. Maybe it makes sense to use FedEx to deliver mail or some such thing - at least TO the warzone, if not IN the warzone. But I start to have difficulty when we get to "security contractors."
Really it seems like when you put a gun in a contractors hands you've broken a covenant of some type. I have real difficulty believing that any independent body like that ought to have the authority to take a life. At least when we talk about capital punishment, the authority to terminate a life comes from the people. That kind of responsibility should not be something that can be "outsourced." If there are people in a foriegn country that in the course of their work may be called upon to kill another human being - that person ought to be a direct government employee, not an independent agent. I do not believe any government has the authority to vest another organization with the right to kill.
The action of taking a life is special enough to require civilian oversight and popular authorization. If we're going to be killing people it ought not be as part of the use of anyone's discretionary budget. The question ought to come before the Congress, specifically. And the people pulling the trigger ought to be directly answerable to the military chain of command and everything that comes with it. This sort of thing wouldn't guarantee that poor decisions aren't made, certainly there are problems with governmental "deciders" as well as commercial ones, but I think this falls under the notion of "the merest appearance of impropriety."
The use of security contractors is I believe the only thing that keeps the motor on the current war going. We don't have the personnel we'd need to keep it in the military and the cause isn't united enough to support a draft - at least not for long. By going the route of private contractors the administration has given itself the ability to wage a war not supported by the nation.
I know people will say "if the Congress doesn't want the war they can defund it" but we all know that while that simple it isn't really that simple. Politics makes for some strange decisions sometimes. As bad as it is I guess our representatives currently value their gigs more than the lives of the soldiers in the field, believing that ending the conflict would also likely be professional suicide. At some point I guess it might get bad enough that the calculus there could change, or maybe enough regular people would really be touched by the war to have some kind of general strike - a protest that would really sting. But really, the structure in place allowed the powers that be to work us into a crack from which we can't extricate ourselves without more personal pain then we're seeing on TV.
We owe it to ourselves to make sure we're not made to make these choices again. At the first opportunity we should make it illegal for the United States to hire private military replacements. That way, in the future if we're all in we're all in. We won't have the opportunity to turn our very real pain into financial pain, and deferred financial pain at that.
Killing people just ought not be so easy.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Lethal Force
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4 comments:
Just a point of clarification: the Blackwater types in Iraq and Afghanistan are not running military ops. That stuff is indeed the province of the soldiers. They are protecting the diplomats, which has never been a military function, even back in WWII. (Even today, when the president goes to a military base or a foreign country, it's still the Secret Service that protects him, not the army.)
The responsibility for the protection of diplomats typically falls to the State Department, specifically the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), which is organized and operates much like the Secret Service in that they are civilian law enforcement officers, not military-trained soldiers. Usually that works just fine but when it comes to an active war zone like Iraq, a cop just doesn't have the training to do the job right. However, under the law, the guys who do have the training and the equiment (the army) are not legally allowed to perform that mission. Hence you end up with civilian contractors (who aren't organized by Rumsfeld or the Pentagon-- they fall under the State Department).
I agree that the whole situation needs to be reassessed but it will have to start with Congress changing the law, first and foremost.
yeh, I get it. I didn't mean to make it sound that way. The distinction I am drawing is between public and private.
It's an interesting quandry. At the end of the day, it sort of feels like we hire these people at the outset (elect them) because we belive that they will do what is right. At what point do we, the citizens, make the red tape so much that nothing happens? At what point due those elected officials take the trust we've put in them and bend it and twist it until it looks nothing like what we gave them.
I guess at the point that they start killing people on purpose.
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