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See no evil: These guys may be the ones with their eyes blacked out, but it’s the American people who are in the dark about private military contractors.

Foreign Policy: What do you make of the $136 million request by the Nuri al-Maliki government to compensate the victims of the Sept. 16 Blackwater shooting?

Peter Singer: I don’t think it will be anywhere near that amount at the end of the day. This seems to be part of a broader effort to ramp up the pressure on not merely the company but also on the U.S. government. The monetary figure was less important than their announcement that, based on the fact that the company had not registered since 2006, it and its employees did not have any sort of immunity to Iraqi courts and that the Iraqi judicial system wanted to go after them.

FP: Do you think this incident is a microcosm of some of the problems the Iraqi government is having in establishing effective institutions?

PS: Well, you can look at this entire episode as a microcosm of what’s going wrong on both the Iraqi government’s side as well as the U.S. side. On one hand, you have an Iraqi [interior] ministry that’s considered fairly corrupt and fairly inept. On the flip side, you have an American mission that is so hollowed out that it’s reliant on forces outside the chain of command to carry out its operations. Our surge strategy has two elements to it: One, to restore stability and security to give the Iraqi government breathing space, and two, to press that government on its political benchmarks. This episode shows the hollowness of both efforts. On the military side of things, the same week that Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker are testifying to Congress about the progress made and President Bush makes a speech about how there’s a return to a sense of normalcy in Baghdad, you have 43 people shot by private military contractors in Baghdad alone; that kind of undercuts [their argument]. Then you get to the political side. Top of the agenda is no longer, “Prime minister, how can you solve this sectarian violence so we can get our troops out of there?” It’s Blackwater.

FP: Couldn’t you argue that private security companies, with the proper oversight, are simply doing a job the American people have deemed necessary but aren’t willing to do themselves?

PS: You could argue that, but I don’t think it would be a truthful argument. The overall percentage of press reports coming out of Iraq that mention contractors is a quarter of 1 percent. That’s a pretty telling point when you want to weigh in on whether the American people are really supporting this or not. Then you get to the second issue, which is that people in policy positions will often say things like, “We had no choice.” That’s either a straight-up lie, or it’s just a classic addict’s denial. You had choices. You chose not to make them because there were political costs that came with those choices.

FP: When you really hear about contractors in the media is when they mess up. Do you think that the recent negative publicity about them is warranted?

PS: It is definitely true that folks are focusing on negative public incidents. But there’s a second element to that, which is that there are a number of incidents over the past several years that simply haven’t been reported in the press. I spoke with one major TV outfit that witnessed a shooting of an unarmed civilian outside its compound. The reason they didn’t cover it is that they couldn’t get good interviews, because the companies would decline interviews. To me, that was utter B.S. If the media actually chose to report on the topic based on whether they could get good interviews or not, we wouldn’t have any stories about Osama bin Laden or Britney Spears, either. It was simply a shirking of their job.

FP: Do you think that if you fix the accountability loophole of the private military industry, you’ve fixed the major problem with civilians in war zones?

PS: There is no loophole. It is not that there’s this wide loophole that contractors can drive through. It’s rather that there are multiple laws that are sometimes in competition [with one another], be it local Iraqi civilian law, extraterritorial U.S. civilian law, or U.S. military law, all of which could apply to contractors. It’s the second element of this that’s critically important, the political will to actually use them, and that’s what has really been lacking. For example, the U.S. Congress recently passed what it believes to be an expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). I’m not a lawyer, but based on most folks’ interpretation of that law, [Congress] simply reinforced it.