PrintOctober 10, 2007
How to change the Blackwater media narrative
Blackwater, the private security company that protects State Department VIPs in Iraq, is now coming under political attack from the Left. It's always possible that Blackwater guards may have overreacted in a Baghdad shooting last week, but of course the media are happy to convict them without benefit of trial. We won't know what really happened until the evidence is in.
It's a very tough job, protecting VIPs in a shooting war with a hidden enemy. If the bad guys want to drive the US out of Iraq, they might just decide blow up some VIP's with truck bombs, the way they callously murdered more than 400 civilians in a single truck bomb attack in a Yazidi village just last month. VIPs rush around Baghdad in convoys that make fat and juicy targets, and the protective detail's response time is measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. It's nearly impossible to get it right all the time, and Blackwater employees have been killed doing their work. But no protected VIPs have been lost.
One possibility is to transport VIPs in properly armored trucks, the MRAPS that have saved so many military lives in Iraq. These are V-shaped armored trucks that direct IED blasts away from the passenger compartment rather than upward, as a cube-shaped truck would. They are very effective, and they don't depend on superhuman reaction times to work.
A less serious answer is to change the name of the company. If Blackwater were called "Whitewater," how could any Democrat criticize them ever again? Some things are just beyond criticism.
James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
