Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very fact that Blackwater guards like the five being presently indicted for voluntary manslaughter are, along with the almost 200,000 other defense contractors currently employed in Iraq, technically outside Iraqi jurisdiction until Jan. 1 of next year, should start to provide answers to these questions. Unfettered by the chain of command and court-martial and outside the reach of the nascent Iraqi government, these mercenaries, specifically commissioned to provide security instead of standard U.S. armed forces, went about for years almost totally free of accountability. It’s almost surprising that the 2007 shootings and the few ugly...
...employment of Blackwater’s soldiers of fortune is problematic not only at those rare intervals when the contractors commit violent crimes against civilians, but always and inherently. As the architects of the war in Iraq maintained that they would respect the sovereignty of the elected Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki and insisted that economic motives could not be further from their minds, the massive army of legally immune private contractors that war effort came to require visibly undermined their every claim...
...Blackwater incident in 2007 was no My Lai, and we can be grateful that no such massacre has apparently occurred in Iraq. But the ‘war on terror’ ought always to have been conducted as much a cultural, humanitarian, and moral campaign as a military conflict. What President Bush’s White House never recognized is that the roots of militant Islam could always be traced back to the very sort of careless and baseless military intervention that it ended up endorsing. The war in Iraq may not be the imperialistic oil-grab some...
...that one President's trash can be another President's treasure. The decorated veteran is most remembered for his controversial role as Army Chief of Staff in the Bush Administration. His testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding the need for several hundred thousand troops in Iraq was challenged and dismissed as "wildly off the mark" by the Department of Defense. Spoiler alert: Shinseki ended up being right, but his public dissent of the Administration's estimate irreparably strained his relationship with his superiors. He unceremoniously retired in June...
...right"- President-elect Barack Obama on Shinsaki's prediction of the troop levels needed to maintain the peace in Iraq...