Mercenaries

 The Lawfare Daily podcast yesterday had on two journalists who had recently been reporting from Africa's Sahel region. One of the themes they spotlighted was the growing role of Russian mercenaries—particularly, the Wagner group—in propping up authoritarian regimes in the region. When a wave of military coups swept the Sahel in recent years, the U.S. largely pulled out any military support for the post-coup military regimes, forcing them to turn to Wagner. 

While ending U.S. support was the right choice, in my view (and in the eyes of U.S. federal law), it did create a vacuum that Putin was able to fill. The Russian forces could claim to be offering military aid to the new regimes "with no strings attached" as to democratization, human rights, etc. And now—with the Trump administration dismantling humanitarian assistance as well, the U.S. appears poised to cede whatever lingering influence it still had in the region to Putin. 

The Russian mercenaries—in the view of people like me and most Western observers—are among the bad guys in this story. They are fighting to advance Putin's geo-strategic interests, to start with—and they are doing so by supporting deeply repressive regimes that overthrew elected civilian governments. And as if that weren't all bad enough—they are also doing all of this for crassly materialistic reasons. They are not only thugs; they are thugs for hire, which is maybe even worse.  

One of the journalists' points in the podcast, however, was to remind us that human beings have complicated motives—and that even someone working for Putin's regime, fighting on behalf of a dictatorial regime in a far-flung corner of Africa, has some rationalization in their own minds for how this is all supposedly a good thing. The journalists noted that the Wagner group mercenaries see themselves as patriots, for one thing, "advancing the interests of the Russian state."

Even more than that, though, the journalists also note that the Russian mercenaries see themselves as helping the people of the Sahel. By backing government forces (even ruthlessly authoritarian ones), they see themselves as bringing "stability" to a region after U.S. pro-democracy initiatives destabilized it. They also see themselves as a necessary bulwark against many of the Islamist militia groups that are fighting the post-coup regimes. In some cases, they described themselves as "liberators." 

Even if they are also working for pay—then—the journalists observed that the mercenaries have mixed motives, some of which could even be described as idealistic. I was reminded of A.E. Housman's famous poetical defense of an "army of mercenaries"—namely, that they "saved the sum of things for pay." Perhaps that is how the Wagner group soldiers see themselves as well—in something of the same heroic light that Housman casts. "What God abandoned, these defended," and all that. 

But—however interesting it may be to understand people's motives and boundless capacity for self-delusion and rationalization—that doesn't mean that any of these rationalizations are right. And so, I think I would have to side with Hugh MacDiarmid's blistering response to Housman's poem. As much as I love Housman (particularly when he is on his best subjects: pessimism, nonconformity, melancholy, and his opposition to capital punishment), MacDiarmid gets it right: 

In response to Housman's claim that the army of mercenaries has "saved the sum of things for pay," MacDiarmid retorts (in "Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries"): "It is a God-damned lie to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride." 

I think we have to render the same verdict on the Wagner group mercenaries. At the end of the day, they are fighting for authoritarianism and repression—however they manage to kid themselves internally about what they are accomplishing. (Though, as I've written before—if Prigozhin had managed to topple Putin's regime during his short-lived coup attempt, I would have to sing a different tune. I would have to admit then—these guys really had "saved the sum of things" after all.)

To show I'm not taking this position out of some lopsided Russophobia, by the way, let it be known I would say the same of our American mercenaries—or, (*ahem*) private military contractors, to use the current preferred euphemism. One of the most notorious of these groups—Erik Prince's Blackwater—was back in the news this week (as Politico reports) for allegedly circulating a plan to Trump's aides that would offer their services to run "camps" to facilitate "mass deportation." 

These American mercenaries—just like the Wagner group—of course have their own preferred rationalizations to explain what they are doing. A follow-up piece of reporting quotes Erik Prince as saying that he was just motivated by a desire to help solve the federal government's current administrative difficulties when it comes to immigration enforcement. "It was a memo generated to describe how to achieve the logistics necessary" to carry out Trump's agenda, he said. 

I have no doubt that the creeps at Blackwater have "complex motives"—just like the Wagner group mercenaries do. I'm sure they see themselves as working for something more important than just money; that they see themselves as accomplishing something more admirable than mere atrocities; and that they see themselves as something more noble than merely thugs for hire. They are the ones "sav[ing] the sum of things for pay," I'm sure they would aver. 

But again—whatever their stated rationalizations—MacDiarmid still gets the last word on this subject. All such men—however they cast themselves in their own head—are in fact "professional murderers," working for "blood money" and taking their "impious risks." 

And if they don't completely destroy our faith in humanity, writes MacDiarmid, that is through no help on their part. "In spite of their kind," he concludes, "some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on Earth."