Fire Blackwater?

TPM reports that a State Dept. panel is recommending dropping Blackwater as the main provider of security for State Dept. personnel in Iraq. The decision will be left to the Obama administration, naturally.

This is an example of too little, too late. It's clear that there has been massive fraud and abuse by private contractors in Iraq, and that the whole scheme of privatizing services that once were, and should again be either handled by uniformed military or by civilian government employees, needs to be completely overhauled. In most cases, private contractors should be excluded entirely. Certainly those whose track records have been deplorable (and that's most of them), should be fired and excluded from eligibility for a good long time.

Of course, in conjunction with a top to bottom overhaul of American interventionist foreign policy all around, which I hope the Obama administration seriously pursues, we can hope that the need for private contractors in these kinds of functions will drop to practically zero in the fairly near future regardless.