Unity of ... What? (Updated!)

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Before we get to the regular post, there is breaking news out of the Land of the Two Rivers. The blaring headline is: PRIVATE SECURITY CONVOY KILLS TWO IRAQI WOMEN. The story goes on to say that 19 bullets hit the vehicle in which the two women were killed.


Oh yeah, there were also two suicide truck bombs in Baiji, killing at least 22 and wounding 30, gunmen in Nineveh province assassinated a provincial police official, and two Baghdad bombing killed 12 civilians.


But back to those wild-eyed mercenaries ...


We saw how quickly the actions of the security detail for the Polish motorcade disappeared from media coverage (or failed to even appear?) after last week's attack. Any bets on whether today's event is more than a momentary blip? (Did we mention that the as-yet unnamed PSC shooters today were--according to the story--not Blackwater people?) Don't hold your breath.


And people ask why we use this domain name.



Our Regular Post:


Today, we’re going to do a retraction. Or maybe it’s more revision than rescission. An adjustment. A bit of waffling. A flip-flop. Call it what you will.

The point is this: something came out this week that caused us to reconsider a few statements made in the past. We’re going to share it because maybe it is a point worth considering.

Vent Your Spleen

Long-term readers will recall that The Rabbit generally takes a dim view of comment threads. They’re typically the province of idiots, trolls and dullards.

Thus, Prior Statement # 1: Comment threads are worthless.

That of course, overstates the situation. Admittedly, threads do tend to be either microcosms of self-validation and mutual back-patting (e.g., our old faves daily kos and coulter.com) or, when varied views do appear, the comments consist of snide volleys and messy backbiting (e.g., most any Youtube thread). But that is not always the case.

This week, we saw one comment in particular that bucked this trend, and it inspired this post.

Thus, Waffle # 1: The overwhelming majority of comments and comment threads would have to massively improve just to rise to the level of worthlessness, BUT every so often there is a diamond in the rough that actually does contribute to the debate.

We’ll get to the specific comment in a moment, but first let’s review The Rabbit statement which the comment made us question

During our liveblog of last week’s testimony, we made Prior Statement # 2: “The ‘we’ve never lost a protectee’ thing, while hugely interesting to Congressmen on various junkets, is a good point, but doesn’t address the use of force issues so much. A better question is whether the RUF in place are too aggressive. Of course, the flip side is we go to a can’t-fire-until-fired-upon sort of regime that has caused so much discontent in the past.”

In context, this statement made sense—we were saying that the good Congressman was not addressing the issue at hand, which was use of force. But the statement can also be taken to mean that the mission on which one embarks has no impact on the ROE/RUF.

Anyone with military or security experience immediately spots the flaw in such an argument.

Waffle # 2: Of course the mission has a direct and meaningful impact on what ROE/RUF should apply. So after we’ve hurried the staff of Blackwater out to the stocks & pillory, it may be worth asking whether we as a nation truly want unity of method, or only unity of effort.

We know what you’re asking: What the heck does that mean?

Glad you asked.

The Meaningful Comment

The gist of the comment is that:

The below-listed diplomats wished they had Blackwater protecting them:

• August 2003: Blast at Jordanian Embassy kills nineteen people; al-Qaida in Iraq claims responsibility




• August 2003: Truck bomb explodes outside UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including UN special envoy to Iraq




• November 2003: Two Japanese diplomats shot and killed in ambush near Tikrit




• January 2005: Suicide bomber detonates truck at Australian Embassy, injuring two Australian soldiers and killing two Iraqis




• July 2005: Bahrain’s top envoy in Iraq wounded when attackers attempt to abduct him




• July 2005: Algerian Charge d’affaires and another diplomat kidnapped and later killed by al-Qaida in Iraq




• July 2005: Egyptian envoy in Baghdad kidnapped and killed in Baghdad, a-QiI claims it killed him because Egypt intended to install a full ambassador




• May 2006: Diplomat from United Arab Emirates kidnapped




• June 2006: Four Russian Embassy worker abducted after attack on their car—in the same neighborhood as the 9/16 Blackwater incident—they are later murdered, along with a fifth abducted Russian




• December 2006: Turkish diplomat shot and wounded in garden of Turkish Embassy in Baghdad

We thought original commenter “jdhawk” was pretty impressive to find those (and other) attacks, until we found an AP story listing them. Nonetheless, Mr. or Ms. hawk does make the point—or at least we’ll give ‘em credit for making the point—that protecting the senior diplomats of a nation when in the middle of a warzone is hazardous business and the threat is quite real.

And one that is ongoing, as demonstrated by the ambush of the Polish Ambassador’s convoy in Baghdad just hours after the recent testimony, resulting in the death of his bodyguard and two Iraqi civilians, as well as eleven security guards and civilians being wounded. (This would be the guy that Blackwater medevac’d, although they weren’t protecting him. Funny how those civilians nonetheless were killed. It’s almost like Baghdad is a dangerous place.)

Unity of Effort

The question we are left to consider is whether a one-size-fits-all approach is really appropriate for all U.S. (and/or coalition) operations in Iraq. Certainly, we desire unity of effort, meaning that everyone supporting the U.S. works toward common goals.

But the argument-of-the-week has been that contractors have complete disregard for US goals while our noble soldiers are all about “hearts and minds.” That is, contractors do not have a common goal of supporting the U.S.

This is more than a little naïve, if not outright disingenuous and cynically misleading.

Our military personnel certainly have a proud tradition of service, and are unmatched at many missions. To argue, however, that the 19-year-old junior enlisted on a hazardous patrol puts nebulous goals like “supporting Iraqi democracy” or “influencing public opinion” over the safety of his or her brothers in arms and the completion of the specific mission at hand is, in a word, ridiculous. Ask a student of history whether armed forces throughout history have fought for noble ideals, or for the guy in the trench next to them.

Similarly, to argue that the civilian volunteer has utter disregard for civilized values is to brand most of them criminal sociopaths and the rest criminal psychopaths. While that is exactly the argument many of the least-rational and fact-constrained critics advance, it is over-reaching to say the least. These are ordinary Americans, many of them military veterans, and to contend that each of ‘em simply checked their values at door does not seem logical.

Those of us left here in the middle do want to see unity of effort—military, government civilian, and private contractors working toward U.S. policy goals. And if you can look beyond the political power struggles being played out here (anti-war, party politics, military-vs-state, etc.) we would assert that all of these various players are seeking to support US policy, although there is—as always—room for better coordination.

Unity of Method

Whether all of the actors pursue that common end, however, is a different question from whether they do so via common means. Or whether they should.

Specifically, given the ongoing and very real threat, do we as a nation desire that security for, say, a logistics shipment be the same as for the US Ambassador? If we have a truckload of mail blown up, does that have more or less of an impact on our national interests than to have a captured under-Ambassador’s head sawn off with a rusty knife in the internet snuff flick of some “freedom fighter” group?

As far as we can tell based on the testimony last week and the publicly available resources, DoD and State private security are operating under the same rules. And whether the various companies are following those rules is currently the subject of more scrutiny than Britney’s child-rearing ability. We shall see what those investigations reveal.

But in the interim, it may be worth considering whether the various forces should be under the same rules. In terms of ROE, it is not uncommon for different military units to have different ROE specified. Should the same be the case for private security?

The public perception seems to be that the current State RUF is more concerned with (as one PSC blogger put it to us privately) whether “the staffers spill their diet coke” than whether the security for the mission defeats the mission itself. If that is in fact the case remains to be seen. But it would seem, at least to our second-rate minds, that the issue of “what those rules should be” is critical to the long-term results of the U.S. mission.

State is purportedly looking at those sort of systemic changes for its part. (The media is still caught up in the frenzy of the Blackwater pile-on, but the press briefing announcing the changes makes it clear that they will apply to whatever company operates in the Baghdad region—using the very same DS-approved individuals Blackwater has today).

In the interim, the question we leave you with is whether the rules should be the same for all security forces in country.

If The Rabbit staff had the answer to that, by the way, we wouldn't be running a second-rate blog.

Conclusion

As an aside, The Rabbit advised before to wait to hear all sides of the story before rushing to judgment, but that just wouldn’t be fun—nor lead to big ratings. The allegations and incriminations just continue to grow in feeding frenzy fashion.

But no matter how big their names or credentials, those who breathlessly repeat every allegation of the heavily JAM-influenced MoI as pure fact (e.g., the Blackwater convoy “wasn’t even hit by a stone”) are going to appear rather biased, to put it mildly, if the U.S. report shows that the actions of the Blackwater folks involved attack or were even in part in keeping with the RUF.

Say, for example, if photos of bullet-pocked security vehicles (as are rumored to exist) are part of the report.

Of course, the ultimate dodge is always available, "We weren't rushing headlong to report a preconceived and biased version of the story, we were just, uh, trying to, um, show one, er, possibility. Yeah."

If, on the other hand, anyone actually wants to do something meaningful in terms of contractor accountability, informing your political representation of support for the Price bill (or its peers) is one option. Everyone (and we mean everyone--even the industry, heck even Blackwater) supports it except the White House, so political action on this front is meaningful.

Or just vent your spleen in our comments section. We'll even get you started: "The Rabbit is a crappy blog and you suck."