Hey you kids, get off my lawn!!

For your consideration…

Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. … Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

— George H. W. Bush, in his 1998 memoir, “A World Transformed”

BarlowFriendz: Exit Strategies

At one point during my recent travels, I found myself aloft sitting next to a mercenary on his way to Baghdad. Well, he wasn’t actually a mercenary, or at least he probably would have objected to being called that.

He is CEO of a firm that does what they call “corporate security” in Iraq, one of several companies that collectively hire the 15.000 “private security contractors” bearing arms in that unhappy land. (In fact, these “plainclothestroops” constitute the second largest armed force deployed there. They out-number not only British forces, but all the representatives of the Coalition of the Willing combined.)

He’s American but his company is based in South Africa, an artifact of his having maintained contracts in various African trouble spots over the years, starting with Zimbabwe when it was still called Rhodesia. He’s not quite Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, but he probably hired him at some point.

This fellow is almost exactly my age, but we went different directions out of college. He went directly, and gladly to Viet Nam, where he put in two tours, one as a Green Beret, and the other as a CIA agent. He continued to work for the Agency for a decade or so, discretely engaged in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, and various other places he didn’t want to talk about.

Despite these credentials, he seemed like an ok guy. He certainly seemed like the sort of fellow you’d want watching your back in certain neighborhoods. If I should go to Iraq at some point, which I’m considering, he’d be one of the first people I’d call.

We didn’t find it difficult to get along despite the obvious political differences we’d had during the decades when he has been literally engaged in war-mongery and I have been a hippie peacenik.

The interesting thing was that we didn’t disagree on much now. We both believed that the invasion of Iraq and its subsequent occupation was a tragic catastrophe that could only get worse.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “before we get out of Iraq, it’s going to make Viet Nam look like a good idea.” And this from someone who thought that our clandestine overthrow of the Sandinistas, in which he had taken part, was a good idea. But now he’s mostly in it for the money. Besides, armed conflict is what he knows.

He couldn’t imagine any way it would get better. The Iraqis, he said, have little respect for the puppet Allawi government. The Iraqi security forces we’re training will not be willing to fire on their own people. But many of their own people will be quite willing to fire on them, putting them at a significant disadvantage. Worse, even within the security forces, it’s hard to tell which side someone is on. The insurgents have an organize effort to infiltrate them, and thousands of recruits have been quietly mustered after discovering that they had connections to one rebel group or another.