We found out this week the Bush Administration wants $189 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan for next year, the most that they have ever asked for in one year. This is on top of the $460 billion for the DOD’s regular budget. The war is costing about half a million dollars per minute. The total cost of just the Iraq war is around $455 billion so far, not counting this newest request.

Don’t worry; we can just put it on the national credit card. Until yesterday, that credit card, also known as the national debt was hitting its legal ceiling. Unlike the rest of us who finally max out on our credit cards, the Federal government can just keep borrowing more. The Senate raised the debt ceiling from $8.965 trillion to $9.815 trillion. This is the fifth time the debt ceiling has been raised under the Bush Administration and in just over six years, the Bush Administration has raised the national debt by almost $4 trillion.

These numbers are mind numbing and depressing but, whether you agree with the war or not, one would assume that the troops are getting all the equipment and food that they need. Hate to break it to you, but we aren’t even doing that with all this money. Just a few weeks ago, a soldier died in Iraq and his parents were talking to NPR. After they told of their sorrow, they also told of how he and his other fellow soldiers could not get enough war fighting supplies and even underwear and socks. The parents, even through their grief, were concerned about the other soldiers in his unit who didn’t have relatives to send them supplies that they needed. This soldier was not based in some obscure area…he was in Mosul. All these high contractor billings are sucking the lifeblood out of the supplemental budget with little oversight. I have documented many of these stories in my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, and I am very disheartened to still hear the troops and the parents of the troops say that they don’t have enough basic equipment to fight or even to protect themselves.

Now that I have totally depressed you for the day, here is some potential good news. Yesterday, Senator Claire McCaskill and Senator James Webb, along with all the other Democratic freshmen senators, got an amendment unanimously passed by the Senate to create a new Commission on Wartime Contracting. This new commission was inspired by Harry Truman’s wartime committee that investigated WWII contractor fraud which saved over $100 billion in today’s dollars. Now it has to pass the House and, more importantly, appoint people to this commission who really want to shake things up, take names and get some of our money back from fraudulent contractor billings. This new commission must also seriously investigate the deep problems that the military has had using private contractors in a war zone in numbers never seen before.

This is still an uphill battle and the powerful war service industry will fight any serious attempts at investigation. But this, along with the media’s new interest in Blackwater and other contractors, may start peeling back the layers of fraud and waste in this war. If we can successfully expose even just part of the fraud that has been going on in this war, fasten your seatbelts because you may see one of the biggest scandals of our generation.

Dina Rasor

Iraq, a country that our president calls a sovereign nation, wants to expel Blackwater, a private security contractor, from their country. The government of Iraq accuses Blackwater of shooting innocent civilians during a fire fight on Sunday while the company was guarding a diplomatic motorcade. They canceled the company’s license but, according to the rules set up by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), they may not have the right to do so. Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, gave contractors immunity from Iraqi law.

The U.S. State Department, one of biggest customers of Blackwater in Iraq, is now in an awkward position because they rely on this contractor to protect them but don’t want to start another incident of push and pull with the Iraqi government. Since the State Department has a civil contractual relationship with the company, they don’t have total legal control over the company’s actions either. Unlike soldiers who would normally guard diplomats in a foreign country, Blackwater is not under the military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and so there is little legal recourse or control over Blackwater’s behavior in Iraq other than canceling their contract. We have placed support and security contractors in a war zone without planning on rules and oversight. We are will continue to reap the problems from this lack of planning and foresight.

Now the State Department has even more problems with the Iraqi government and has to play a delicate legal and diplomatic dance. They have to somehow appease the angry Iraqi government while letting them know that they don’t have any legal control over who shoots up their streets. They also have to keep relying on a potentially errant contractor because they have to have them to function in the country.

This is not the first time that Blackwater has interfered with the military and diplomatic policy between the U.S. and Iraq. As told in my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War and in media accounts and lawsuits, Blackwater triggered an international incident when they sent out allegedly unprepared employees who were ambushed, killed, burned and hung on a bridge in Fallujah during the early part of the occupation.

Here is a description from my book on what happened because of a mistake of this contractor:

“Unfortunately, the incident would have a domino effect leading to an explosion of insurgency violence against the troops and civilians alike and a grave threat to the stability and future of the country itself. Fallujah turned into ‘terrorism central’ exporting car bombs throughout the country. Senior Marine officials on the ground considered the tragedy the result of a tactical error. They intended to eventually restore stability in the area of Fallujah, but it was a tinderbox at the moment, and the Marines were being careful not to reignite it. But President Bush had other plans. America’s resolve was being challenged. ‘We will not be intimidated, we will finish the job,’ he said through his spokesperson. This forced U.S. military commanders to plan retaliation…It was payback time. In April 2004, U.S. and Iraq forces staged an invasion of Fallujah resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi civilians and a number of Marines, before withdrawing and effectively handing the city back to the insurgents.”

The battle for Fallujah also displaced 300 thousand Iraqis and leveled much of the town. This new incident may drive a wedge between the State Department and the Iraqi government, right at a crucial time when the U.S. is trying to get the Iraqi government to move on a political solution. The Iraqis are angry and tired of seeing private military contractors cowboy their way through Iraqi towns with no consequence and little oversight. The State Department feels compelled to defend their bodyguards but also has to tell the Iraqi government that they don’t have any legal recourse to any potential wrongdoing by contractors with guns in their own country.

We want Iraq to start to take responsibility for their country but insist that our contractors do not have to follow their laws. Do we really expect them to believe that we truly want them to become a sovereign nation? Until the Administration and the Congress start to get legal and financial control over these contractors in Iraq, they will continue to negatively affect the outcome of this war. It is just a matter of time before another incident by a contractor will put us even farther behind in developing a functioning nation in Iraq.

Last Wednesday, in the middle of the Larry Craig scandal and close to the upcoming Labor Day weekend, the Army announced two investigative initiatives concerning contractor spending on the Iraq war. This announcement happened just days after it was reported in the Washington Post that the DOD planned to ask the Congress for another $50 billion for the war on top of the existing $147 billion request before the Congress.

To stop the immediate bleeding of money from the Army contracts, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren plans to have the Army examine around $3 billion worth of contracts that were in Kuwait because there has been fraud found in the letting of contacts in that area. . There have been 20 military and civilian Army employees indicted for contract fraud. It sounds like a very large review but keep in mind that KBR alone has had more than $20 billion in contracts since the war began.

In the longer term, the Army has set up a Special Commission on Army Contracting which will report in 45 days to see if the Army can “ensure future contracting operations are more effective, efficient and transparent.” The Commission will be headed up by Jacques Gansler, a former DOD official who has been revolving in and out of the Pentagon since the 1970s.

This sounds like welcome help considering the contracting disasters of the Iraq war. As I exposed in my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, this massive outsourcing of the war to contractors has drained the US Treasury while not providing the soldiers what they need to fight this war. I am concerned that this new war service industry will continue to bedevil the DOD and the troops even after this war is over.

However, the Pentagon archives are full of commission and task force reports that were supposed to bring change. Sometimes these commissions were set up merely to deflect criticism during a rash of scandals or to appease an upset Congress. Some of these commissions really had good intentions but institutional pressures made sure that their reports gathered dust with little or no change. I would like to hope that the Army’s actions are more than a Kabuki dance to ward off more biting Congressional investigations and not just to get their next $200 billion money fix.

Dr. Gansler has his work cut out for him. He currently runs the University of Maryland’s new Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise, which, according to the university, “fosters collaboration among the public, private and nonprofit sectors to promote mutually beneficial public and private interests.”

Hmmm….I guess I am worried about this because I see too cozy of a relationship between the Army and their private contractors in Iraq. The Army has allowed the contractors to walk all over them, bill outrageous sums and even threaten work stoppages in a war zone to get paid. Since there are now more contractors in Iraq than troops, we have to wonder if this new war service industry “collaboration” with the Army needs to be fostered or whether the Army has to stand up to the contractors despite the politics. The Army needs to insist that the contractors fulfill their duties and finally give the troops what they need. This will require criminal and civil prosecutions beyond going after some of the small time crooks and going after the systemic fraudulent practices of the big and politically connected contractors.

Will the Army reform itself during this war? The odds are against it. Most effective reforms of military contracting have come only because the Congress has passed laws insisting on it. Congressional and media exposes of fraud and waste helped pass reform laws in the Congress during the 1980s (most of these reforms have been wiped out in the past 20 years) and the Truman Commission in World War II actually did indict large defense contractors in a war and even jailed a general. I will be watching the Army very carefully in the next 45 days to see if they really get a handle on this unprecedented yet underreported scandal. The Congress could help these investigations along by putting in their own reforms to “help” the Army to do the right thing.

History is against any meaningful reform but our troops deserve no less. They are putting their lives on the line and the Congress and the Army must give them what they need, not what the contractors need to make a profit.

Dina Rasor