The news about Blackwater in Iraq has gone surprisingly quiet. Perhaps the US authorities have learned that they cannot get by without the "outsourcing."

Private contractors have been on American battlefields since the Revolutionary War. Since Vietnam contractors have been involved in everything form constructions jobs to running laundries and mess halls. In the earliest days of the Iraq War Donald Rumsfeld thought he could keep the number of "boots on the ground" to a minimum and he approved the outsourcing of many normally military related jobs.  Now the number of private contractors in Iraq is estimated to be as many as 170,000 personnel, with approximately 20,000 involved in private security work.

In Vietnam a US contractor caught black marketeering was convicted by a US military court but the case was later overturned in the US when the judge said that the military had no jurisdiction on civilians in a non-declared war. But civilian contractors working in Iraq are not immune to military prosecution because of a provision in the 2007 defense spending bill that recognized that Congress had authorized the Iraqi War and therefore civilians can be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

In Iraq the fact that contractors have been engaging in direct combat has further blurred the distinction between the military and non-combatants.  Amid questions of reckless behavior of Blackwater USA, the FBI has sent a team to Iraq to investigate the recent shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians.  The State Department initiated a through review of the use of contractors for security and concentrated on several key issues:

•  Should the rules of engagement under which State Department security contractors operate, particularly for approaching suspicious vehicles, be changed?
• Has Blackwater's corporate culture encouraged employees to violate or stretch the existing rules more so than other private security firms the State Department uses in Iraq like Dyncorp and Triple Canopy?
• Is it feasible to eliminate or drastically curtail the use of private contractors to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq?

No report has come out yet and it has been reported that the State Department may have found itself in some what of a quandary when it was learned that Blackwater may have been granted immunity for any prosecutions from defending State Department personnel. There is no formal report on this information and all statements from State on Blackwater have gone strangely silent.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, reportedly said, "We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq. The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."

Hopefully American lawmakers will avoid overreacting here. The irony of the Blackwater case is that it comes at a time when more and more contractors are beginning to work under Iraqi government contracts.  Unduly curtailing their efforts in response to a media-generated public outcry will damage the fragile effort to stabilize the region to the degree that we can start to pull out.

Cowboys should but punished, no doubt.  But the key thing to remember here is that outsourcing in and of itself is not the problem.