BushCheney’s Legacy: Chaos, Contractors, Mercs and Military

(A hearty welcome to GreyHawk! bumped at 1:45 – promoted by buhdydharma )

Where to begin…? Sifting through the various remnants of news that percolate through the blogosphere and occassionally leak out onto the traditional media, watching as the words stain and run like ink written in blood, I’m trying to piece together several aspects of the current state of our nation after six and half years of a maniacal, arrogant Executive Branch that’s been desperately protected by the Republican leaders in Congress.

The topics are many.  Environmentally, they range from enhancing the denial of global warming evidence to outright enabling of faster destruction of national rivers, streams, mountains and forests. In terms of national security, New Orleans recovery from Katrina stains mix heavily on the page along with the Walter Reed scandal and screwing the troops, all while the military is stretched to the breaking point and beyond, and the same imbeciles who brought us into Iraq — based on lies that switched between false claims of ties to a preventable 9/11 disaster to false claims of Al Qaeda support or possessing and developing WMDS — are now actively striving to get us into position to bomb the sh!t out of Iran.

So, where the hell to begin? What kind of legacy have these feckless fools crafted for our upcoming generations?

I suppose the best thing is to focus on one core area — what appears to at the driving root of so many of the problems, and in many ways representative of the chaos, tragedy, loss and legacy of bloody, violent destruction that we appear to have coming with the end of this tragic Presidency.

Iraq.

Yes, it is a premeditated war based on lies and propaganda — effectively turning the Bush Administration and those who helped to craft the lies that sold war into Grade A war criminals. From it, we have seen the horrors of the Walter Reed scandal, the near-epidemic levels of PTSD and traumatic brain injury, contractors gone wild and billions of dollars simply lost.

Perhaps the biggest ongoing — and currently breaking — scandal has yet to be encountered. Constantly, we encounter story after story of failures in contractors; many times, we are beseiged by stories of overpricing by KBR and their parent company Blackwater. And recently we’ve even seen some horrors zeroed-in upon by Blackwater in its role as State Department security. Most folks associate the role of “private security contractors” as being synonymous with the role of mercenaries, but there are far more contractors in Iraq than simply mercs — more than simply guns-for-hire. There are civilian contractors there to help rebuild infrastructure, and not at the point of a gun. We don’t often hear much about them, and they are often caught between a rock and hard place — people rarely hear about them getting screwed by “the system” and when such news comes out the knee-jerk reaction is (in my experience, anyway) a grim, satisfied smile by people who believe any contractor deserves what he or she gets. The word “contractor” has taken on severe negative connotation.

Perhaps that’s not undeserved in some cases, but it is too broad a brush — yes, even for contractors. They aren’t all mercs. They aren’t all greedy or opportunistic. And those who fall outside of those definitions are also getting screwed, but one decidedly unfair factor that distinguishes them from the way our troops are getting screwed — the contractors have virtually no recourse.

To some degree, some changes have come along that could help manage the gun-toting extremes. But even with such measures in place, we have no idea how many total contractors of any type are actually over there. Trying to find out an answer to the question of “how many” reveals an inability — and perhaps an intentional unwillingness — to competently track the numbers of people, the missions and the degree of success or completion.

It’s almost as if close scrutiny might reveal something we aren’t supposed to know about the type, quality and source of some of the contractors, particularly if some of those numbers could be used to surreptitiously offset the numbers of “boots on the ground” required for security purposes. It also leads me to wonder how some troop requirements may be filled in the near future, especially as this recalcitrant Administration has already stated that it fully intends to leave the problems of Iraq for the next President.

That’s one way to attempt to scuttle under the door without getting squashed by a burdensome legacy, but I don’t believe it’s going to work in this case. If I were associated with the BushCheney Administration, I wouldn’t simply be worried about my legacy. I’d be terrified of it. Perhaps terrified enough to actually attempt to do something positive for a change…And when the Boss himself issues a record dedicated to criticizing your entire Administration, you know you’re legacy is in trouble.

But, of course, that wouldn’t occur to anyone actually part of that horrible, no-good very-bad legacy. Otherwise, we’d never have gotten this far along into this bloody mess to begin with.

Bah. I think I’ll go do something more constructive instead…this thinking about the BushCheney legacy is putting me off my lunch.