Buried in the second to last paragraph in a piece on p. 10 of the New York Times yesterday was this bit of information that is never highlighted when a discussion of the new U.S. build-up in Iraq comes up: Two Iraqi advisers to Mr. Maliki said there would be more than 1,000 American private security guards coming to Iraq to protect the 300 military and intelligence advisers that will be here to help the Iraqi government fight ISIS, far more Americans than previously acknowledged. One adviser said the number of private guards would reach 1,700. In other words, the recent addition of 300 U.S. special ops guys is actually an add-on of 1,300-2,000 personnel, mainly hired guns (the Hessians of modern American war). And it would have sounded an awful lot worse, an awful lot more like a genuine escalation and intervention if the president had mentioned figures like those rather than the few hundred special ops troops he spoke of or the few hundred regular troops or Marines he ordered in the previous week to guard the embassy in Baghdad. (I wonder if they have a hired gun contingent with them too?) Tom nytimes/2014/06/26/world/middleeast/isis-iraq.html
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:23:18 +0000
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