By Morgan Cohen –<\/p>\n
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously quipped<\/a>, \u201cYou go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want.\u201d On December 31, 2011, what remained of the army we had in Iraq \u2013 some 33,000 troops<\/a> \u2013 withdrew, providing a bookend of sorts to America\u2019s near decade-long occupation. But while the war may be over, Iraq remains a battle zone, and the Obama administration has planned an unprecedented civilian effort to fill the void.<\/p>\n An estimated 16,000 civilians will remain on the ground under the auspices of the State Department. The size of the operation \u2013 which the Washington Post<\/em> has called<\/a> the largest since the Marshall Plan \u2013 is rivaled only by its scope. The State Department will assume over 300 activities<\/a> currently performed by the military. As the Post <\/em>reports<\/a>, it will field 5,000 private security contractors to protect some 1,800 U.S. Embassy workers, as well as a number of sites at Iraqi airports and a handful of police-training facilities. The State Department will also operate its own air service and network of hospitals, both of which are to be staffed by a further 4,600 private contractors. Finally, an additional 4,600 contractors will be deployed to instruct Iraqi forces on how to use military equipment purchased from the U.S.<\/p>\n The military nature of the State Department\u2019s mission in post-withdrawal Iraq is a logical, if unexpected, byproduct of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). The SOFA creates two distinct classes of individuals<\/a> for the purpose of allocating jurisdiction over U.S. personnel. The first class is comprised of \u201cUnited States forces\u201d and their civilian components, over which Iraq and the United States share jurisdiction. By contrast, Iraq maintains exclusive jurisdiction over the second class of individuals, which consists of \u201cUnited States contractors and their employees.\u201d However, the terms \u201cUnited States contractor\u201d and \u201cUnited States contractor employee\u201d only apply to contractors operating under a contract or subcontract with \u201cUnited States forces.\u201d In practice, this means that Iraq only has jurisdiction over Defense Department<\/em> contractors; American contractors operating under contract with other departments, like the State Department, are immune from Iraqi law.<\/p>\n For much of the past year, President Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attempted to negotiate an agreement that would have kept several thousand U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the year-end deadline set\u00a0by the SOFA. The talks broke down over Obama\u2019s demand that American troops receive legal immunity for their actions, a request Maliki could not oblige without alienating anti-American elements in his governing coalition. Consequently, in order to protect the thousands of American diplomats and other civilian government employees slated to remain in Iraq after the withdrawal is complete, the State Department is stepping through the SOFA loophole to field an army of private security contractors that will operate beyond the reach of Iraqi law.<\/p>\n As McClatchy<\/em>\u2019s Warren Strobel put it<\/a>, \u201cState Department contractors in Iraq could be driving armored vehicles, flying aircraft, operating surveillance systems, even retrieving casualties if there are violent incidents and disposing of unexploded ordnance.\u201d The militarization of State Department duties has alarmed some experts. Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, characterized<\/a> the State Department\u2019s assumption of military activities as \u201cone more step in the blurring of the lines between military activities and State Department or diplomatic activities.\u201d Other experts have expressed concern over the State Department\u2019s lack of experience in managing and supervising such large numbers of contractors without Pentagon aid. \u201cI don\u2019t think State has ever operated on its own, independent of the U.S. military, in an environment that is quite as threatening on such a large scale,\u201d said<\/a> James Dobbins, a former ambassador who also served as a special envoy for Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Somalia. Max Boot, a national security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, has echoed these concerns, calling<\/a> the State Department\u2019s reliance on private contractors, \u201cunprecedented in scale,\u201d and noting that \u201cthis is not what State Department people train for, to run an operation of this size.\u201d<\/p>\n Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also questioned the wisdom of a strategy that relies so heavily on private contractors, given that poor oversight of similar operations in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has already cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The Commission on Wartime Contracting<\/a>, an independent, bipartisan legislative commission established to study wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, has estimated<\/a> in reports to Congress that anywhere between $31 and $60 billion has been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan because of waste and fraud on the part of private security contractors. In October, Dov Zakheim, a member of the Commission, told<\/a> the House Government Oversight Committee that the Commission was \u201cvery, very worried\u201d that the State Department would be unable to supervise the contractors\u2019 extensive operations. Another Commission member, Robert Henke, testified<\/a> that \u201cthe bottom line is we rely on contractors too heavily, manage them too loosely, and we pay too much for what we get.\u201d<\/p>\n It is too soon to tell whether the State Department\u2019s experiment in \u201cmuscular diplomacy\u201d will strike the right balance between the demands of America\u2019s strategic interests, on one hand, and the limited resources with which we will be able to pursue those interests, on the other. For now though, one thing is quite clear: we may have gone to Iraq with the army we had, but we will stay in Iraq with the army we can buy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Morgan Cohen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online","category-student-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZtUX-Lr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/nsj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}