Soldiers of Misfortune

Just like security guards, only with ‘tude and big guns

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
10/2/03

Mercenaries, like genocide and child rape, have been around for a long time. According to Wikipedia , they date back to the days of Pharaoh Ramesses II, some 3,400 years ago. Even back then, they were used to subjugate occupied societies and to act as palace guards for the leaders and aristocrats. Ramesses hired some 11,000 of them, so there was a whole lot of subjugating and guarding going on.

Feudal Japan had private armies and roving divisions of samurai, willing to fight for any warlord who could afford them and against any warlord who couldn’t. Despite all the bushido claptrap that is used to ennoble them 500 years after, the fact is they were a vicious and vile lot who didn’t mind getting paid in pillage and rape.

England made heavy use of mercenaries, particularly in the colonies. A lot of the hated “redcoats”, justly accused of brutality and lack of respect for people or property, weren’t English at all, but were in fact Prussian mercenaries. Earlier, of course, England had privateers, sea-going mercenaries who amounted to pirates licensed by the Crown to ply their trade. After they stopped being cost-effective and Elizabeth stopped hiring them, many went free-lance and preyed on English shipping along with everyone else’s.

The Swiss Guard, a mercenary group out of Switzerland, played a small but vital role in getting the French revolution going. The French made heavy use of mercenaries in later years, most infamously the French Foreign Legion, a practice that abated after a grateful population in Angola publicly executed four mercenaries in the late 1970s.

In the early twentieth century, America used mercenaries. At home, they took the form of private armies, most notoriously the Pinkertons, and were used by corporations to intimidate and bash workers and unionists (in the Homestead Strike of 1892, they slaughtered 11 workers) and roust the poor and blacks from trains and any town that didn’t want “riff-raff”. Overseas, America had a private air force in China, the Flying Tigers. While it’s hard to argue, especially in hindsight, with shooting down planes of the Japanese Imperial Air Force, it certainly provided the Japanese with provocation and doubtlessly played a role in the eventual attack at Pearl Harbor.

It was just about that time that Hitler discovered that a private army of his own could be quite useful in swaying public opinion and helping him in elections. Krystal nacht, the coordinated attack on Jews and their property in Nazi Germany, was largely the work of Hitler’s private army, the SA, or “brownshirts”. Later, when he had control of he military, Hitler noticed that private armies were undisciplined and of doubtful loyalty, and had his purged, usually with piano wire or firing squad.

It’s a helluva note when Adolf Hitler thinks you’re a bad example.

Mercenaries are expensive, usually poorly trained, and of dubious loyalty. So why have any?

They are useful when there is an actual war and major social unrest and the powers that be want to crack sculls without getting accused of ordering it. And when things calm down, you don’t have to garrison mercenaries and pay them to twiddle their thumbs until the next war comes along. You can just pay them off and send them on their way.

The downside, as many a small warlord has discovered, is that sometimes they don’t go away, but instead take over from their erstwhile employer and set up their own little fiefdom. This doesn’t usually result in enlightened governance.

The US signed a UN treaty, “Resolution 44/34, the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.” It defines mercenaries as follows. 1. A mercenary is any person who: (a)Is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; (b)Is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar rank and functions in the armed forces of that party; (c)Is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a party to the conflict; (d)Is not a member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict; and (e)Has not been sent by a State which is not a party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.

2. A mercenary is also any person who, in any other situation: (a)Is specially recruited locally or abroad for the purpose of participating in a concerted act of violence aimed at: (i)Overthrowing a Government or otherwise undermining the constitutional order of a State; or(ii)Undermining the territorial integrity of a State; (b)Is motivated to take part therein essentially by the desire for significant private gain and is prompted by the promise or payment of material compensation; (c)Is neither a national nor a resident of the State against which such an act is directed; (d)Has not been sent by a State on official duty; and (e)Is not a member of the armed forces of the State on whose territory the act is undertaken.

So does the use of Blackwater employees, recently accused of killing as many as 195 Iraqi civilians, violate the treaty?

Apparently the official role of Blackwater is that of security guards, which is technically legal. The ones who are out in public with machine guns, that is. Many have the fiscally questionable but otherwise legitimate function of providing ancillary services for the troops over there. The “guards” are there to protect ranking personnel and visiting dignitaries, just like the thugs who surround some of the more disreputable rap stars in Detroit and LA. One may note that the employ of vicious but untrained thugs hasn’t noticeably reduced the death rate among rap stars.

I’ve noted before that the use of private sector employees in such a situation is damaging to morale. Most army officers have a way of wondering if they are in the wrong racket when the guy who cleans their office at night is not subject to their orders and discipline, but makes five times as much money. And the undisciplined and murderous clowns in the shiny reflective glasses and with the big guns and itchy trigger fingers make twenty times as much, and answer to nobody except corporate clowns thousands of miles away who are more interested in protecting the company than they are in serving the country. In the meantime, the vicious and ignorant antics of these clowns have contributed to the widespread popular hatred that the troops in Iraq have to deal with, because the average Iraqi, watching some Blackwater clown strut around, an overprivileged and overpaid security guard, sees the clown not as a Blackwater employee, but simply as an American. The whole Fallujah mess started when four mercenaries decided they would just swagger through town and got turned into kebabs hanging from a bridge.

With the latest revelations, it’s time to look into kicking all the private companies out of Iraq, and greatly reducing the scope and range of their power.

I’m not saying that in the far-too-late hope of salvaging any good will among the public of Iraq, either. If Putsch can hire them as president to intimidate and slaughter Iraqis, what’s to stop major corporations from hiring them to intimidate and slaughter American workers, just like in the good old Pinkerton days? Do you really think this administration would stop them?