Off the Books — Perspectives

Yesterday I heard on the radio the story of Marine Captain T.S. Williams, who crash landed his bullet-riddled jet fighter on an airstrip in Korea in February 1953, hitting the grass without flaps or wheels at 200 miles per hour. Ted Williams resented being called back to active duty six years after serving in World War II. He was a professional baseball player – the best pure hitter in history. But he was also a citizen-soldier who considered it his duty to go. He flew 39 combat missions before resuming his career. The four Blackwater employees who were sentenced to prison on Monday for killing 14 unarmed people in Nisour Square eight years ago were mercenaries hired by our government to prosecute its war in Iraq. None of us who weren't there can judge those men – only our justice system can do that, and it seems, once again, to have done a more credible job of protecting our principles in times of terror than many other institutions.

We can, however, condemn the things the men did in our country's name. And above all, we can criticize a government that fights its wars with hired hands, outside any chain of command and unfettered by military regulations, whose presence enabled the Bush administration to conduct operations off the books and out of sight, so that we still have no full accounting of the financial or human costs of this disastrous war.

There may be things to privatize, but America’s defense is not one of them.