Mojo on Privatization, Mercenaries and Redefining Words in Bush's War

A Fistful of Dollars creating a "New Word Order"

Though we now have perhaps 135,000 American troops in Iraq, "what has to be remembered is that a large proportion of [them]… are reservists working on a wide range of projects. The core group of perhaps 80,000 combat troops is far too small to secure Iraq even if it were aided by effective Iraqi forces, and these are simply not there."

As it stands, reports Brendan O'Neill at the Alternet website (Outsourcing the Occupation), American troop strength is so low that most Iraqis -- 77% by one poll -- have never had an encounter with a member of the occupation forces. (This reflects as well the strain of the Pentagon's being committed to an ever greater global imperial mission with ever smaller military forces -- since so much of the Pentagon's budget actually goes into the creation of a vast array of 21st and 22nd century high-tech weapons and into the "pockets" of the megacorporations that create them.) As a result, in places like Najaf, it's been the "contractors," often brutal forces under no legal constraints or oversight in a land of which they know nothing, who have been left in small numbers to man the battlements.

Major article with many links.