Those are highly-skilled, well-motivated guys. A lot of them figure, why do it for less when I can do it for more?

If I’d gone career military, I might figure the same thing after awhile.

That’s a laugh. The military folks I’ve talked to about this look at Blackwater and the other contractors as people who’ve abandoned real military service so they can get triple the pay, doing military-ish jobs, without being constrained by the discipline of proper rules of engagement (thus endangering real military folks who are lumped in, in the minds of Iraqis, with the shoot-first ask-questions-later Blackwater types).

Contractors in Iraq typically cost at least 3x what it would cost to have military personnel do the same job. Of course, we have a shortage of personnel at this point — that could partly be fixed by raising pay, but the root cause of people refusing to re-enlist, or to enlist in the first place, is gross mismanagement from on high; and fixing that will take a while.

This is only a real problem because a high number of leftist journalists will focus on this story to the exclusion of anything else. They will also shy away from telling the American people that companies like Blackwater are an important factor in today’s struggle against global terror. Our military literally could not do without them. They annually save the taxpayers billions. Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administrations have anything to be ashamed of.

The Congress must take steps to monitor the behavior of Blackwater and the other independent contractors. Nonetheless, these rules should be reasonable—and not draconian.