What God Abandoned?

 The New York Times reported yesterday that, due to the collapse of any international response to the security crisis in Haiti, the Haitian government has been forced to hire private security contractors (mercenaries, in short) to help fend off the gangs (which really operate in Haiti more like paramilitaries). As one might imagine, it's already going terribly. 

But what choice did Haiti have? The rest of the world has stopped paying attention to the nation's suffering. The much-ballyhooed Kenya-led multinational security mission never amounted to much. 

The United States has lost interest and retreated into an isolationist "America First" ideology. By its lights, sending aid to Haiti is the last thing the White House intends to do. And no country is noticeably stepping up in the United States's absence to help the Haitian people. 

One thinks of what A.E. Housman once wrote about another "Army of Mercenaries"—"What God abandoned, these defended." Except God didn't abandon Haiti—we did; along with the rest of the world. So can one fault them for turning to the only other means of defending themselves? 

I still hold no brief for the leaders of the mercenaries themselves—particularly not for that Prince of Darkness himself, of Blackwater fame. When it comes to them, I still agree with Hugh MacDiarmid's immortal riposte to Housman's poem—which I have quoted many times before. I particularly agree with it as applied to Prince. 

But I can't blame Haiti's leaders for turning to some bad actors when all other options had failed them, and the rest of the world—most especially the United States (which bears so much historical responsibility for Haiti's plight) had chosen to look away. 

And when it comes to the front-line contractors who have now been kidnapped, disappeared, or killed in the tragic attempt to aid Haiti—even if they did it for pay—I think, as to them, Housman was closer to the truth than MacDiarmid:  

These, in the days when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth's foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling

And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

They stood, and the earth's foundations stay;

What God abandoned, these defended,

And saved the sum of things for pay.