Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Are Civilian Contractors Working for an Occupying Force A Legitimate Military Objective?

Posted by Diodotus at 9:51 AM

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6 comments:

Joe said...

Independent contractors who sign on to perform services for one side or another in time of war are in effect choosing which side to be associated with for the length of their contract. Furthermore if the services being performed are on or in support of military installations or personnel, then those contractors should then be considered military resources and fair game for destruction by opposing forces. The moral ambiguity associated with their deaths should be no more or less then if anyone else in the imperial army were to be killed.

December 19, 2007 at 12:44 PM
Stu said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
December 19, 2007 at 10:49 PM
Stu said...

The killing, mutilation, burning, dragging and hanging of four private contractors in Iraq was a tipping point. Those vulnerable, though arguably legitimate, targets became props in the drama that turned Iraq into a truly chaotic and failed state.

It is worth looking at "No End In Sight" to gain better perspective on the role of these deaths:

http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

Is rebuilding Iraq like fitting pipes on the Death Star? I imagine that many see it precisely this way. I don't. Contractors in Iraq, whether for pipes or intel, are opportunists. They seek wealth and likely find it, at considerable risk, but consenting all the time to the danger and living the American dream, no doubt.

Those four private contractors had their bodies desecrated; it was immoral and sickening. Did they deserve it? I think not.

December 19, 2007 at 11:24 PM
Cleitus the Black said...

Now, now, gentlemen; let's make sure we don't confuse your average roofer-on-the-Death-Star with the four foolish mercenaries who drove an unarmored vehicle without a map into known hostile territory, a Darwinian act on par with General Custer's decision to attack a certain Indian village at the mouth of the Little Big Horn.

The mob simply played their part in the plodding progress of human evolution when they separated these four well-armed and poorly-informed misanthropes from the human gene pool, and I for one shall shed not a tear...

Paid $600.00 per day and armed to the teeth, former Special Forces operatives - vulnerable, I'm afraid, is not the first word that pops to mind...

They were little more than mercenaries, and not particularly good ones at that.

As for the chopping up of their remains, well, I assure you that the deceased were unlikely to object - it's only the living who bewail such things, and we only do so when 'our' pet humans are so treated...

Pray tell, oh, great humanist, doth thou remember the bloated and disfigured body of Abu Zarqawi as he (along with sundry dead wives an children) was dragged from the rubble of a villa demolished with multiple 2000 lb high-explosive bombs? Was that sad corpus any less desecrated than those of Scott Helvenston and company?

Or how about Saddam's brother, whose head parted ways with his shoulders when he took a long drop on a short rope?

"Alas, poor Barzan, I knew him well, a man of infinite jest and wisdom..."

December 20, 2007 at 6:15 AM
Stu said...

Armed to the teeth but stupid enough to get caught and mangled by the mob equals vulnerable to me. You certainly cannot claim these men were invulnerable. Clearly they did become pawns or puppets for those who wanted rage and disorder to increase.

Perhaps a few more shed tears on all sides are in order.

December 20, 2007 at 2:40 PM
Cleitus the Black said...

Well, I have tried to squeeze out a tear for Blackwater employees, but it's like the proverbial blood from a turnip, so I shall put down my onions and smelling salts, and pick up the virtual pen.

Does stupid equal vulnerable?
Perhaps. In this case, stupid equals dead, and good riddance, from a strictly evolutionary perspective.

Survival of the fittest (fit, in this case, being people who don't perform a cost benefit calculation on $600 vs probable death & dismemberment and say "lets go for it!") works for the every other invertebrate species on the planet, (bar the ones that we've domesticated) and although I am all for domesticating Homo Sapiens and breeding them into some more interesting, useful, uniform and aesthetically pleasing varieties, that is unlikely to happen, so I am perfectly content to let the stupid weed themselves out of the genetic garden. Too bad the ugly and the boring cannot likewise benefit from the genetic dead-end of being vulnerable- err, I mean, stupid.

My only concern is that it is apparently not happening fast enough, as the unwashed masses have continued to grow while us intellectual elites dwindle in numbers...

December 20, 2007 at 5:37 PM

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