Incredibly important story doesn't go far enough. It's hard to believe neither the LA Times editors nor Miller were aware of last year's "Iraq for Sale," which covered numerous issues that this article should have addressed, such as: [ ] the claim that taxpayers are paying contractors to do jobs that US troops used to do for far less money. [ ] the claim by one soldier that he was forbidden to wash his own clothes even though it came back from the contractors dirtier than when he'd sent them. [ ] the claim that US troops had to be diverted to protect contractors' employees. In addition, the full scope of the L.A. Times story should have analyzed how well the contractors are performing (remember the contaminated water one ... More »

LA Times finds a provocative headline for a fairly ordinary story. Reading down to paragraph 6 we find there are 21K Americans, 43K foreigners (Kuwaitis?) and 118K Iraqi's. Those are reasonable numbers. Hiring local nationals helps the Iraqi economy and is preferable to sending GI's to do the work.

A good factual story that unfortunately injects opinion and therefore completely misses the point. It tries to paint having more contractors than military as a bad thing, when in actuality this is the best news possible. The contractors wouldn't be coming there in droves unless it was safe enough for them to do so. I keep wondering how our press can continue to find bad news in good. Are they really that stupid?

The underreported story of private contractor, missing is the.. no plan for occupation. Do American tax payers approve of going into debit to pay every(corporation)one and their brother to shovel ---- in Iraq. The criminal non-reasons for being in Iraq are missing from this report.

This article has some good information as a starting point to a discussion of US contracting in Iraq. Knowing the number of contract employees is intresting but leaves one with many questions regarding the contracting process and accountability.

Fact error in the first line. The Occupation has been over for years. Sovereignity was returned to the Interim government of Iraq in 2004. We are now fighting as allies against the terrorists. Apparently the LA Times wants the terrorists to win. May the terrorists and their allies in the LA Times be confounded. Quelle Suprise: the Iraqi government and its coalition partners hire Iraqis in addition to foreign contractors. When you combine the hired Iraqis with the foreign contractors, you get a number larger than the number of US forces. To a reasonable man, this would indicate that the US footprint is small, too small for an "Occupation" but more along the lines of a military assistance operation.