The Best Allies Money Can Buy

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

In 2003, I was on a trip to Iraq and had arranged an appointment in the Green Zone with a member of the then-Iraqi Governing Council. Security was tight. I was with my Iraqi translator, a middle-aged man who had once been a teacher. When we arrived at the council, after a long walk, I showed my ID to two young uniformed U.S. soldiers. They told me to wait, went inside and out came a man wearing civilian clothes, one of those fishing vests and an Australian bush hat.

He never properly identified himself, but it was obvious that he was a “civilian contractor” from the logo on his shirt. When I tried to explain why we were there, he literally told me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my Iraqi translator to sit in the blistering heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if our Iraqi interviewee was available. I have to admit it: both my translator and I really wanted to just punch his lights out. But I kept thinking to myself: “Who does this guy report to? If I get in his face and he comes after me, to whom do I complain?”

That was my first encounter with one of the many private security guards, service suppliers and aid workers — a k a civilian contractors — who have since become an integral part of the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some were even used at Abu Ghraib to do “enhanced interrogations” — a k a torture — of suspected terrorists. Today, there is no operation that is too sensitive not to outsource to the private sector.

As we debate how many more troops to dispatch to Afghanistan, it might be a good time to also debate just how far we’ve already gone in hiring private contractors to do jobs that the State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. once did on their own. A good place to start is with the Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger’s new book on this subject, “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.”

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