Rescuing The Lone Rangers
Will Bunch of Attytood beautifully calls foul on some silly claims from Pajamas Media (sic), that the controversy over bloody Blackwater’s license in Iraq has even caused the CIA to shut down operations outside the Green Zone:
The bizarre logic here escapes me. The surge is working so well that our own CIA agents — trained for months at “The Farm” in Virginia to learn how to kill a man with a ballpoint pen, and that sort of thing — are now afraid to walk out the front door without a bevy of allegedly trigger-happy men toting machine guns and firing indiscriminantly?
My God, what was it like in Baghdad before the awesome power of the surge?
What I took away from Richard Miniter’s rightist spinning was that if the Agency has really not been going out in the field without armed guards, then no wonder the intelligence they bring back is so bad. Pointing guns is not how you get the truth, and such overt activity only gets the people you talk to killed. One hopes the spooks have more sense in the real world.
Bunch does make one point I have to object to, about some other contractors. He quotes the bathrobe bloggers again:
There are now more private contractors working in Iraq than U.S. soldiers serving there. Many are not U.S. citizens. Triple Canopy, another private firm, usually hires Peruvians to man the checkpoints inside the International Zone and Ugandans to guard distant airbases. The Peruvians, known as “incas” among Americans there, usually do not speak English or Arabic—a persistent source of complaint by Iraqi politicians who speak one or both languages.
Then Bunch gets all politically correct:
“Incas”?
It’s one thing to hire foreigners at low wages to serve as car-bomb fodder, but do we have to insult them, too?
Speaking with an indigenous American heritage I am proud of, I would be proud to be called an Inca. But the best model of a response to that came over a century ago from the Prime Minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, responding to a taunt over his own heritage:
Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.
