I actually find Max Boot to be a pretty insightful conservative these days — maybe more on that in a later post — but this just made me LOL and LOL harder, as if on LOLerskates.

It’s a little odd to see Tom Friedman, normally the high priest of globalism, in a lather about the use of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aren’t firms like KBR, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater models of the kind of entrepreneurial firms he normally trumpets if they’re producing widgets or microchips?

I’m pretty sure that widget and microchip manufacturers don’t occasionally shoot fleeing civilians in the back or open fire at them on the road. Nor do they get involved in exploitative prostitution schemes. You know, typically.

(Actually, to step on my joke, Boot concludes his post with this reasonable bit: “[Mercenaries] need a regulatory and legal framework that more closely integrates their operations with our military forces in the field and that holds them to account for wrongdoings. Working to design such a framework is a lot more useful than simply bemoaning the contractors’ existence — or poking our allies in the eye while you’re doing it.” That doesn’t actually unlock the inherently problematic nature of having combatants in a theater who do not fall under the authority of a U.S. commander — not even the contracts themselves force private security firms to embrace a population-protection mission, and so unity of effort gets bollicksed up — but, you know, it’s not a bad sentiment.)