Blood Money

 The Wall Street Journal ran a disquieting piece yesterday about how the Blackwater mercenary group is taking advantage of the collapse of U.S. international security assistance to pitch itself as the hired guns of last resort. In a world where Donald Trump has slashed U.S. foreign assistance to the bone—if not choked it off entirely—Blackwater sells prospective clients on the idea that it can serve as a "gap-filler." 

"What God abandoned, these defended," perhaps—to quote A.E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries." Except God didn't abandon these countries—the United States did. And now, they have no choice but to hire mercenaries with an appalling human rights record to undertake a campaign of licensed murder. It's hard to think of anything more dystopian—this privatized outsourcing of killing. 

The most prominent example the article gives is in Haiti—where Blackwater runs a drone program that engages in targeted assassinations of gang leaders. According to the Journal, "The drones killed at least 233 gang members and three civilians in April and May." And how many of those alleged "gang members" had due process before their summary non-judicial execution? Sounds like zero. 

It's hard to blame the Haitian government for clutching at any solution that might curb the gangs or weaken their grip on the nation. I don't blame them—but I do blame the U.S. government for putting Haiti in this position in the first place by eliminating the security assistance that could be used to build Haitian state capacity—whereas instead Haiti's crisis is being used to line the pockets of U.S-based war profiteers. 

So, has Blackwater "saved the sum of things for pay," as Housman put it? Hardly. I'm inclined to agree with Hugh MacDiarmid's riposte to Housman's poem instead: "It is a God-damned lie to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride./ They were professional murderers and they took/ Their blood money and impious risks [...]"—such was his timeless verdict on any band of killers-for-hire.

Indeed, the lines seem especially appropriate for Blackwater. The article suggests that they have had their fingerprints all over the worst atrocities of recent U.S. history. It was Erik Prince who allegedly first pitched the Trump administration on the idea of confining noncitizens in El Salvador's ghastly CECOT prison. And, decades earlier, the group was involved in widely-condemned civilian killings in Iraq. 

The best that could be said of such mercenaries, MacDiarmid concluded—and we agree with him—is that "in spite of all their kind, some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on earth."