Monday, August 20, 2007

Who's fighting this war?

Is this why this quagmire in Iraq is costing us billions of dollars every week?

On top of the nearly 150,000 US troops in Iraq, we have 127,000 contractors employed by our military industrial complex? Less than 20% of them are American?

Anyone see any irony in the extreme right wingers taking an extremist stance on immigration and border issues but allow US Contractors being payed via our tax dollars to recruit the same individuals who they don't want here to fight a war "over there"?

1 comment:

Charley Underwood said...

I thought I was fairly well informed about Iraq, but I was completely shocked last week to learn that Workers' Comp had released the figure that 1,000 contractors had died in Iraq. This is in addition to the 3,700 plus troops I already knew about.

It is also tragic how the use of mercenaries has deepened the brutality of the war. I'm about halfway through an amazing book by Jeremy Scahill called "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.' The absolute lawlessness and arrogance of mercenaries like those from Blackwater have accelerated a very deep Iraqi resistance to the U.S. Not exactly the way to win hearts and minds (see the post "A soldiers perspective" below).