Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Blackwater shootout in Iraq
I saw this on the news last night and thought it was almost laughable. Not because possible innocent people were injured or killed, but because the Iraqi government is forbidding the company, Blackwater, to operate in Iraq. Blackwater is the largest private security company operating in Iraq. They conduct dignitary protection missions in a very dangerous place. Do you think the dignitaries they escort really want to be without the company's services? If it does come down to it, what would prevent the company from changing names and continuing to operate? Our government may look into the specifics of the incident but I doubt we will see a cancellation of Blackwater's contract.
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13 comments:
People will still use them as escorts. In case no one has noticed, Iraq is a giant hell hole, and probably will continue to be into the foreseeable future.
As for if anyone will get their wrists slapped over this? Eh, no. Someone in the company is probably hunting/fishing/frat. buddies or brothers with a person of influence in Washington.
I read the day after the incident that the Iraqi government will not revoke Blackwater's license. I do have a question however. What do you (the participants of this blog) think about what happened? Do you think the contractor's were at fault or not. If you research Blackwater, you will find that the majority of the people they hire are former military personnel, and many of them have special operations training. My point being that these men are highly trained and I doubt they would be careless enough to shoot unarmed citizens.
I don't know all the specifics of the incident but I can attest to the fact that when the war first broke out, Blackwater's hiring standards were quite stringent. Like you stated, most were military guys with special operations experience and a few SWAT guys. As time went on and the company got bigger they have started hiring less than "upper tier" operators. I will suspend judgement on this one.
Yes they probably did have to start hiring less than "upper tier" men, because many of their agents were probably being gunned down by these innocent civilians by day and terrorist by night. The Iraqi people don't rant and rave when one of our soldiers gets killed by one of their people, but only have critism for our tactics and place the sole blame on the U.S. for the conditions in Iraq. I think the Iraqi people should buck up and start taking some responsibility for what they do. After all, we could have just stayed out of their wonderful country and let Sadaam slay them all.
>The Iraqi people don't rant and rave when one of our soldiers gets killed by one of their people, but only have critism for our tactics and place the sole blame on the U.S. for the conditions in Iraq.
This sentence contains numerous logical fallacies, including false information (there are people who don't rant and rave against our soldiers, like the entire area of Kurdistan, among others) and straw man (nobody places the "sole" blame on the U.S. for conditions in Iraq).
>After all, we could have just stayed out of their wonderful country and let Sadaam slay them all.
This is a slippery slope. Hussein had neither the desire nor the capability to kill 25 million Iraqis.
Hussein wasn't commiting genocide from what I hear. He was just favoring one religious group over another and making one submit to the other. These groups are evidently violent with or without Hussein but way more violent without. While we are at it why don't we attack the Chinese for being communists? Oh, ye that's right, they are a humongous country with over a billion people. May be we should leave them for later.
>Hussein wasn't commiting genocide from what I hear.
Well, he wasn't committing it at the time the war began, but he had engaged in it in the past. He used chemical/biological weapons against the Kurds, the Shi'ites and Iran.
By my understanding, and please correct me if I am wrong, we did not attack Iraq because of anything Hussein was doing to his own people (this may have been an underlying reason). We attacked Iraq and destroyed/restructured its government because the country was a safe haven for terrorists and terrorist organizations. Granted, I know there were other reasons, but this was why we attacked Iraq as a part of the War on Terror if I understand everything correctly.
If that is true 'timothy hybart' wouldn't it mean that the only way we can measure that we are succeeding is to not get attacked by terrorists again? That seems difficult seeing that if we do get attacked then we failed and if we don't then we have to stay there to make sure it doesn't happen.
If you mean success in the War on Terror then I suppose you are correct. If you are implying that success in Iraq means we don't get attacked any more then I think you're incorrect. Restructuring the government, by my understanding, is meant to keep Iraq from being a safe haven for terrorists. We may still get attacked, but it will more likely be based from somewhere else. This does not mean we have to stay in Iraq forever.
So we agree that our offense is weak because our enemy can strike from anywhere right? So then let us switch to a stronger defense. Remember the year the Buccaneers whipped up on everyone basically with defense alone? War is like a game of football or a game of chess. Infact a lot of the games and songs we sing are based on war. "Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes ashes we all fall down." Shoots the game of life was a war game too. We need to apply the tactics we have grown up with and are second nature to us.
>We attacked Iraq and destroyed/restructured its government because the country was a safe haven for terrorists and terrorist organizations.
Sort of. There were something like 13 official reasons for the invasion. Connections to terrorism were one of them. The only connections that turned out to be true, though, were connections to Palestinian terrorists. There were no connections to al-Qaeda or 9/11, which some people argued were the reason we went in. Weapons of mass destruction were always the biggest reason.
Daniel, there are different approaches to dealing with insurgencies than traditional war and most of the strategies that work in one don't work in the other.
>We may still get attacked, but it will more likely be based from somewhere else.
As far as any available evidence shows, prior to our invasion, no anti-American terrorist attack ever had anything to do with Iraq.
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