Open Left

Mercenaries allow plausibly denial ways to engineer a war (4.00 / 2)

I recommend reading the whole article:

The Really Bad Dogs of War
by Srdja Trifkovic

In the two decades since the Iran-Contra scandal, however, a few major "international security firms" and "private military contractors" have come into being to satisfy a particular requirement of the U.S. government: to provide military training, logistics, arms, equipment and advice to foreign clients whenever it is desirable for Washington to be able to plausibly deny direct American involvement. The most important among them has been MPRI. The firm has claimed "more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon," including Gen. Carl E. Vuono, the former Army chief of staff; Gen. Crosbie E. Saint, the former commander of the US Army in Europe; and Gen. Ron Griffith, the former Army vice chief of staff. There are also dozens of retired top-ranked generals and thousands of former military personnel, including elite special forces, on the firm's books.

MPRI is to Blackwater what a general is to a sergeant. It is less interested in the heat of combat than-in its own words-in "training, equipping, force design and management, professional development, concepts and doctrine, organizational and operational requirements, simulation and wargaming operations, humanitarian assistance, quick reaction military contractual support, and democracy transition assistance programs."

When the 1991 UN arms embargo prevented the Clinton Administration from helping Croats and Bosnian Muslims directly, MPRI was engaged to do all that the U.S. government preferred not to do openly.

(emphasis mine)


DemocracyABC.org
TheRealNews.Com
http://www.pdamerica.org

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by: metamars @ Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 08:02:47 AM CDT