20,000 U.S. Mercenaries in Iraq

NYT - Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias -- by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000...

The price of this partnership is soaring. By some recent government estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18 billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants, electric lines and oil refineries...

Like so much of what's happening in Iraq, using mercenaries has led to unintended consequences, such as running up the cost of the project and draining the special forces that are the foundation of Rumsfeld's "revolution in military affairs." When neoconservatism comes to mean the combination of Paul Wolfowitz' utopian and Straussian fantasies of remaking the Middle East and the free-market fetishism of privatization proselytized by Grover Norquist, implemented by an anti-intellectual President who expects to be taken in the rapture before the apocalypse, you have to wonder if the term neoconservatism retains any precise or useful meaning. - Daily Kos Front Page

Further down, Wally argues they should be called neo-imperialists, not neo-conservatives. "They have undeniably taken control of a resource rich region to "manage" those resources, they are imperialists."