Nathan Hodge

Almost 50 thousand U.S. troops remain in Iraq who are supposed to be out of the country by the end of the year. However, Iraq remains a very a dangerous place and The State Department announced that it will  hire over 5,000 private security contractors to fill the void and protect military hardware and diplomats who will remain in the country. Reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Nathan Hodge says there's more than one way you can solve this problem. One way, of course, is not to be in the country. Another is to use the State Department's diplomatic security service, but it is not nearly big enough for this situation.

Nathan Hodge looks at how our failure to establish peace in Iraq prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy: shifting the U.S. military’s focus to counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized, and humanitarianism has been armed. Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders follows this experiment in armed social work from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti.