Walzer on Mercenaries

Let me join Daniel Davies in expressing disappointment in Michael Walzer's badly underreasoned article on mercenaries in The New Republic. The whole crux of the argument comes here:

Whatever Blackwater’s motives, I won’t join the “moral giants” who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur. If the Comintern could field an army and stop the killing, that would be all right with me, too.

Look. Of course if you make the alternative to "do nothing" sending in Comintern (or whomever) to "stop the killing" then sending in Comintern looks good. But when you're considering the wisdom of sending a Stalin-directed military force into the situation you don't get to stipulate that doing so is going to work. Similarly with Blackwater. There aren't people sitting around saying "wow, the situation in Sudan sure is terrible and for a reasonable fee Blackwater could make it all better but I'm against that because it's, like, wrong man." Rather, I highly doubt that introducing a bunch of heavily armed unaccountable mercenaries into the situation would actually make things better.

I do think it's worth asking if we can come up with mechanisms of control and accountability that would make dispatching mercenaries into situations where troops are needed but nation-states are unwilling to send their national militaries into an attractive option. It's clear, however, that we do not in fact have any such mechanisms in place. Under the circumstances, you don't just unleash a plague of mercenaries somewhere in order to demonstrate your good intentions.

Comments

"Wow, the situation in Sudan sure is terrible and for a reasonable fee Blackwater could make it all better but I'm against that because it's, like, wrong man."

Whoa, Michael Walzer is arguing with The Dude now? Who the hell invited him to the bowling league?

Posted by Matt Stevens | March 10, 2008 3:38 PM

"...plague of mercenaries..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Somehow you have to get that phrase TM'd! Geez, that must have about, oh, 5000 uses!

Posted by steve duncan | March 10, 2008 3:41 PM

Ending violence and establishing durable institutions that will prevent future violence is more than a military job. It requires diplomacy. It requires that the men doing the fighting exercise restraint, and that they have a deep understanding of the effect the use of force in specific instances will have on the overall military/political/diplomatic situation.

The US military in Iraq has made this a cornerstone of its current strategy, and while it may be too late for that strategy to work (and maybe it would never have worked in the first place) it's vastly better than what was tried before and vastly better than the bloodthirsty alternatives advocated by a lot of Stateside pundits.

On the other hand, Blackwater's role in the war is pretty much summed up by its foray into Fallujah that got four of its contractors killed and prompted the US military's first, under-prepared assault on that city, and its shooting-gallery approach to defending convoys which got a lot of civilians killed in a high-profile case a few months ago that sparked an international incident.

Which is a long way of saying that, yeah, you're absolutely right that it's absurd to stipulate, for the sake of argument, that sending security contractors into an enormously complicated war zone will automatically make things better, rather than worse.

Posted by JB | March 10, 2008 3:47 PM

Well, you could legally bind them to follow the orders of a chain of command led by the democratically accountable civilian president, court martial them for disobedience, & make their commanders accountable for their actions, as the Geneva Conventions require. Oh wait...

Posted by Katherine | March 10, 2008 3:51 PM

I'm a little confused. Comintern always had a high proportion of NKVD employees, but it was a politically oriented group. Furthermore, during its operation it controlled only three and half states (USSR, the MPR, Tannu Tuva, and Republican Spain during the war), or in other words, the USSR. I realize Walzer is trying to be clever here, but he's a bit of an idiot if he can't remember which massive military body (The Warsaw Pact) we faced off against for 40 years.

Posted by Greg | March 10, 2008 3:54 PM

Matt,

Hi there. I haven't read this particular article, but we've blogged on this topic over at Neither Property Nor Style (see URL link) in response to a couple similar articles (see the links in our post).

Personally, I think that the Blackwater option has some possibilities, but the command and control issues (as well as rules of engagement) you mention are absolutely vital to the discussion. I mention them in the comments to our blog post, but I'm also particularly interested on who gets to decide whether or not to deploy such a force.

One of our commenters brought up a point about having a completely separate unit within the Army (i.e. a Brigade) that has the sole purpose of peace operations. This has particular legal ramifications and challenges to how to fill the personnel requirements, but it also has some potential (i.e., along the lines of Special Forces in which the personnel join after they have completed their initial service).

Best,
Josh

Posted by Josh Jones | March 10, 2008 4:04 PM

Matt,

Whoops!

Here's the post-link.

http://neitherpropertynorstyle.blogspot.com/2008/03/outsourcing-genocide-prevention.html

Best,
Josh

Posted by Josh Jones | March 10, 2008 4:09 PM

Nice clear straightforward rebuttal.

Posted by Fred X. Quimby | March 10, 2008 4:18 PM

Actually, the straightforward rebuttal starts with comparing Blackwater with the paramilitary groups operating in Southern Sudan. The comparison is, of course, unfavorable to Blackwater, which, in Iraq, has encouraged and smiled on its members murdering Iraqis for sport. Now, perhaps Walzer meant that while Blackwater is a highly corrupt company, featherbedding in the state department and recruiting an international array of thugs to produce anarchy in Iraq as well as creating mayhem that has killed thousands - as in the inflaming of Fallujah - he thinks all of these qualities would be super duper in Sudan.

How about starting from another premise: mercenaries are hired murderers, and will operate with the same respect for ethics as the Mafia.

Notice, further, in Walzer's rant, that he rather ignores - or rather, blatantly omits - the whole history of Blackwater. He is, in a word, an asshole.

Oh, and one should never leave a comment about Blackwater without a reminder that Andrew Moonan, the Blackwater employee who got drunk and decided, for kicks, to murder a bodyguard of the Iraqi vice president's, is still free in the U.S., has built himself a nice 300 thousand dollar home in Seattle, and is still being protected by his accessories to murder in the Bush State Department. The name of the man he murdered is Raheem Khalif Hulaichi.

Posted by roger | March 10, 2008 4:46 PM

Executive Outcomes tried this in Sierra Leone. I have read too many differing opinions of their actions to offer a viewpoint, but it represents an interesting comparadum. Ultimately, if I recall, any 'gains' they made in stability were reversed upon their exit. Also, their actions seem to have been funded from diamond profits, which was ultimately fueling civil war in the first place.

Posted by Nate | March 10, 2008 5:04 PM

At least Walzer is willing to try something.

This is a pointless topic. Darfur is doomed, as are at least the next several places of regional massacres. Not after Iraq, where we had vast legal justification in the form of an original, unfulfilled UN Security Council mandate, the subsequent ceasefire agreement and nearly a score of additional Chapter VII Resolutions violations; documented genocide and use of wmd's; crucial national interests in terms of unhindered trade in vital commodities; a long history of state-sponsored terrorism; and a huge air, land, and sea deployment already in place for over a decade-- and nearly everyone is still convinced we had no business intervening. If trying to force a conclusion to the long-running disaster in Iraq is seen as unjustified, no Darfur-like situation has a chance in a million of getting support for intervention.

Posted by Robert Powell | March 10, 2008 5:40 PM

What about the use of Executive Outcomes in Angola in 1994, and Sierra Leone in 1995? They seemed to do as good or a better than international troops.

Maybe the lesson is not to send AMERICAN mercenaries to places.

Posted by MNPundit | March 10, 2008 5:47 PM

Fuck you Walzer.

My great-uncle was seriously wounded fighting in Spain in the International Brigades, and then harassed in the UK when he got home.

I have no love for Stalinists, but there were many more people involved in the Comintern than just Stalinist flacks.

Posted by dadanarchist | March 10, 2008 5:49 PM

Fuck you Walzer.

My great-uncle was seriously wounded fighting in Spain in the International Brigades, and then harassed in the UK when he got home.

I have no love for Stalinists, but there were many more people involved in the Comintern than just Stalinist flacks.

Posted by dadanarchist | March 10, 2008 5:50 PM

Ah Nate, I think the point is that they succeeded where UN forces failed or at least were less effective.

Posted by MNPundit | March 10, 2008 5:53 PM

Despite his academic reputation in moral philosophy, Walzer has always seemed a bit dim. A communitarian squish.

Posted by SqueakyRat | March 10, 2008 6:23 PM

Much of the time these sorts of analyses are made not to in any way to find approaches which would in reality improve the lives of those struggling in the area of misery (in this case Darfur / Sudan).

Rather such pieces are written so that the morally superior writer can demonstrate that he's not one of those shameless, fringe-y dogmatic left types, and he reveals his superiority by clarifying where he differs from where he believes his leftist betes noires would be found.

Posted by El Cid | March 10, 2008 7:18 PM

The Comintern exerted much influence in Spain during the civil war, but to say that they _controlled_ Spain is a vast exaggeration. Albeit one that is common in conservative circles. The forces fighting for the Spanish Republic included a broad coalition of people- Basque nationalists, syndicalists, Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, anarchists, and even a few progressive Catholics like Simone Weil. They weren't really under much central discipline for most of the war- some would say this is why they lost the war.

Anyway, just because Stalin was _using_ the Republican forces for his own ends, doesn't make them a bad cause to support. There was a lot that was wrong with the Republicans, particularly their anti-religious persecutions, but they were still better than the Nationalists.

Posted by Hector | March 10, 2008 7:19 PM

Might market incentives provide the regulatory mechanism we're looking for? I imagine that the credible threat of denied future revenues stemming from a tarnished reputation and subsequent denial of additional contracts would do a better job of regulating firm behavior than legally binding agreements to follow the Law of Armed Combat, Uniform Code of Military Justice, etc. Legal accountability is important; the problem with Blackwater/Iraq was not that regulations weren't followed, but that clear legal jurisdiction was only established AFTER private security firms started getting into trouble and then only after the Iraqi government made a diplomatic issue of it. But I see no reason why, setting aside our collective discomfort with the idea of mercenaries as a foreign policy tool, good behavior in combat couldn't become a selling point by which private security firms compete with one another to be more effective with less "collateral damage." This combined with clearly defined means of legal recourse against firms or individual employees would seem to solve much of the problem; the only downside is that market signals = dead civilians.

Posted by MI | March 10, 2008 7:30 PM

Part of the problem is that the Euroweenies have grasped for a higher morality at the same point they have become unwilling to shed blood and treasure for it. And much of the rest of the world is in a free ride mode of thinking - that Country X is terrible and the Americans or Europeans must do something about it - But NOT us Brazilians, Mexicans, Egyptians, Japanese, Indians, Chinese - we prefer to stick to internal issues......

And that means that few want to be stuck doing UN "Peacekeeper" roles for decades on some buttfuck countries joined Border. That they will do it only in what they see as "safe duty". And that they will fold like wet cardboard and run at the 1st sign of danger, as they did in the Rwandan and Bosnia genocides. And why the US finds so few willing to join in risking their asses in Afghanistan on a mission MATO called "critical".

Let alone for some black Muslims in Darfur.

Add into that that the Left and the transnational Jewish - EuroLeft intellectual alliance that has all their fine "international law" and "human rights NGOs" not only refuse to risk their own asses on missions they hector countries to embark on ---they are the 1st to demand witchhunt prosecution and trials of troops that do go in for the least missteps.

Because they hate the West and it's military forces as much or more than the Somali Warlords, the 1st thing returning troops from Canada and the Netherlands faced was stories that slimed them and demands for Show Trials for Canadians beating up Somali thugs and the Dutch for failing to protect their charges. Just as the Sulzberger family of the NYTimes saw Abu Ghraib and borderline misconduct like Haditha and grounds to criminalize Americans that would never have done such acts outside the stress and violence of a war zone. By going to Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq - those men entered into a more challenging higher-risk situation where their instincts and fear fought against their training and ability to maintain ROE (rules of engagement) orders they thought added to their and their conrades danger.

Thus the actions of the human rights activists, transnationalist Jews and Hard Left Euroweenies has actually made national leaders and generals EVEN MORE LOATHE to intervene in a humanitarian manner in a conflict. Go and the lawyers who hate the military will be watching your every move - seeking to burn you, seeking in every way to advocate for the terrorist and their "innocent enemy civilian backers".

The general attitude is becoming "fuck their international laws". And, let those who hate the West and their militaries get off the sidelines and enforce those precious laws.

It is far safer to a leader and the generals, to oppose any use of military except self-defense. Then you can go in and kick ass and no one cares what a fringe of EuroLeft and Jewish human rights activists whines and snivels about. And the hundreds of Abu Ghraibs and Hadithas and summary justice like US Army and Marines did in the heat of battle in the Civil War and WWII are forgotten about as trivial, and expected shit given war's exigencies.

Basically, the people of Darfur are screwed.

And they are screwed by the people out to criminalize and morally taint America and it's military that have worked so hard to demonize soldiers in a conflict outside their country that no sane leader or general wishes to expose their forces to destruction by the media and by activist lawyers.

Perhaps a solution is to hire mercenaries since no nation wishes to harm it's people doing a humanitarian intervention since they will get no credit for it, only exposure to criminal charges and "moral outrage". Mercs could go in on a contract, with listed ROE. But they would probably insist on the ability to punish "innocent enemy civilians" found supporting the combatants, ability to shoot any reporter they had not authorized into their area on sight, legal immunity from accidentially whacking the wrong people...

Posted by chris ford | March 10, 2008 8:54 PM

I'd add that the Left has engaged in a 40-year effort to demonize mercenaries as usurping the Supreme Moral Authority of the UN and the deterrance of bold statements of diplomatic deploration. And their faith in the potency of economic sanctions that kill the kids of the country the dictator oppresses - enough that El Supremo will end his bad ways because he feels so sorry for dead civilians..

Not to mention their faith in endless Talmudic-argumentation style , due legal process where Slobbo had gone 6 years while tens of millions were paid out to lawyers arguing about a trial and a trial never happened before Slobbo was dead of natural causes in his "3-Star" luxury proson suites.

Perhaps an alternative is to tell oppressed 3rd Worlders that the problems of overpopulation caused the woes in Darfur and Rwanda and Somalia - people competing with other people over scarce natural resources. And the days people could just cowardly run and wait for white people to fight their battles and die for them while they avoided combat and became "welfare refugees" in Europe or in 100K plus people hovels - is over.
The word should be that they must start controlling their breeding rates and that they must learn to get and use arms to fight their own battles.

Posted by chris ford | March 10, 2008 9:15 PM

I have to say that this has to rank up at the top among unexpected rants by Chris Ford about how the Joooz and teh Leff and the mud people screwed everything up.

Posted by El Cid | March 10, 2008 10:40 PM

Powell: "Not after Iraq, where we had vast legal justification in the form of an original, unfulfilled UN Security Council mandate"

Still shoveling his bullshit.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 10, 2008 11:24 PM

About a year and a half ago Germany announced it was expanding its ground troop numbers explicitly for humanitarian interventions. The weird thing is that seems to be the last time that issue was in the news.

Also, Walzer might as well have called his article "And a Pony!" Entrusting what might be the most dangerous organization in the US with regards to the danger of a coup - after all, who trusts crazy ultra-religious armed murderers with political connections and who kill for sport to obey the law - to stop the genocide in Darfur is silly. They would probably just start raping everyone. Having innocent civilians be raped and murdered on both sides, not just one side, isn't progress.

Posted by Reality Man | March 11, 2008 1:11 AM

"They would probably just start raping everyone."

I think you are confusing them with Pakistani UN troops, notorious for raping and otherwise sexually exploiting Africans.

Posted by Fred | March 11, 2008 2:06 AM

I am amazed that in the US the idea of international law just doesn't exist. There are many inner-city situations in every country where the state has little purchase and bad stuff happens. *Nobody* says lets allow vigilantes on the loose to clean these places up. We know where that leads, and we don't want to go there.

Why doesn't this apply in the international sphere. After WWII it was well understood how destructive war had become and that the greatest crimes identified at Nuremberg was the use of war as an instrument of policy.

Interventionists trumpet Kosovo--but it is far from clear that the intervention led to any reduction in killing or suffering, but from Kosovo we got Iraq. And if we don't quickly relearn we will be in a situation where countries--countries other than the US--wage wars to pursue their national goals. How can making war fashionable reduce suffering.

Very, very few interventions are particularly successful in the long run anyhow. People in the US may think interventions are OK because others will be on the receiving end but 3 trillion dollars later this may not be so clear.

If people really cared about the suffering in Darfur there are doubtless things that they could do. They might take longer to have an impact than shooting and bombing but the results will be much better. That would require patience and some humility.

Posted by Chris Dornan | March 11, 2008 4:26 AM

Well-intentioned boobs like Walzer and Boot have no idea what they are talking about. This article isn't "under-reasoned" but rather idiotic. Not only is he clueless about what is going on in Darfur (perhaps a minor point, facts have never been a strong point at TNR) but he seems to be totally unaware of the disastrous, ridiculous history of white mercenaries in Africa - Mike Hoare, Bob Denard, Executive Outcomes, the Wonga Coup? At one point there were even Serb mercenaries in the Congo. All for naught and all another pipedream by the clueless white man, well-intentioned but blind, blundering around the third world, doing more harm than good.

Sometimes inaction is not such a bad thing. Curbing our lust to intervene in the affairs of foreign countries might be the best way to build accountability. Mercenaries, yes, almost always a bad idea.

Posted by Copperhead | March 11, 2008 4:29 AM

Boobs, undeniably.
Well-intentioned, sadly, no.

Posted by MFB | March 11, 2008 5:55 AM

The thing about Walzer here is also it really seems like he's not talking about Darfur. He seems to just be wanting to show off how moral he is for his old-fashioned TNR-style liberal friends in academia. This allows them to feel superior to post-Vietnam liberals who are more likely to think about consequences of intervention, any type of intervention, and not just rely on good intentions. I had a dream about 3 months ago where I was able to raise my own group to intervene in Darfur (yes, I know this makes me a bit of a dork) to fight the janjaweed, but that was just a dream. If there really was some option on the table that seemed reasonable, we would back it. Wazler seems like he saw too many 80's action movies where sending in crazy people to fight other crazy people actually works and the crazies turn out to be heroes. This isn't philosophy, it's ego masturbation.

Posted by Reality Man | March 11, 2008 8:44 AM

Those who are actually curious about the situation in Darfur / Sudan may wish to check out Alex de Waal's blog on the subject at the Social Science Research Network blogs.

http://www.ssrc.org/blog/2008/01/08/darfur-activism-the-debate-continues-part-2/

A sample:

On my recent visit to Darfur I was told of a shootout on the edge of one of the IDP camps. No-one was killed, but a four-year old boy was frightened and ran away into the bush. His mother tracked him down some hours later and brought him back to the camp but he was so dehydrated and traumatized that he died. Should we be arguing as to whether this poor child was a victim of violence or stress, whether it was war or genocide, whether better security or better health services are more important? The bottom line is, this kind of thing should never be happening in our world. Along the same line, the strongest point you raise is the “so what” question — does it matter whether the government is weak or strong, and whether the atrocious counter-insurgency conducted in 2003-04 was a conducted according to a well-orchestrated plan, or whether it was clumsy and ultimately counterproductive? It was killing maybe 200,000 people and needed to be stopped.

The problem is, the closer you come to the problem, the more complicated it becomes. Twenty three years ago, Bob Geldof raised a huge amount of money for famine relief in Ethiopia and told the world public that the problem was very simple — all that was needed was their money and getting the bureaucrats and politicians out of the way. There was enough truth in that to make it a compelling point. But Geldof quickly learned that feeding the hungry is a fiendishly difficult business — alongside reaching the needy, the aid operation in Ethiopia fed the army of Mengistu Haile Mariam, which was instrumental in creating the famine. In that instance, the charitable impulse triumphed over the politics of human rights. Stopping atrocities during wars is no less difficult, and a mirror-image challenge can arise when the demand for justice overrides the pragmatics of finding solutions that save lives.

I strongly believe that the details of what is happening in Sudan — the rivalries within the regime in Khartoum, the ethnic relations in Darfur, the relationships between the profiteers from the war economy and the military entrepreneurs — do matter. I think that social science brings a great deal to the table. I’m sure you won’t disagree with this — but I fear that using the language of “evil” encourages those who want to brush aside the essential subtleties of how wars unfold and how authoritarian regimes function.

I don’t believe that explanation is exculpation, and I don’t think that understanding precludes judgment. To the contrary, the moral imperative is unchanged — it makes no difference to the victims of a massacre whether they were killed as part of a genocidal campaign or whether it was “only” a crime against humanity, and the guilt of the perpetrator is, I would argue, indistinguishable.

But fine-contoured empirical distinctions can make a huge amount of difference when it comes to making things better in Sudan. Over the years, we have seen enough disastrous interventions in Africa’s wars and famines to know by now that clumsy and simplistic responses are almost always destined to make things worse.

Posted by El Cid | March 11, 2008 8:53 AM

Great post, Cid. Thanks.

Posted by Robert Powell | March 11, 2008 5:58 PM

"El Cid: Rather such pieces are written so that the morally superior writer can demonstrate that he's not one of those shameless, fringe-y dogmatic left types, and he reveals his superiority by clarifying where he differs from where he believes his leftist betes noires would be found."

This is the finest capsule description of the New Republic that I have ever read.

The only addition I would add is that the bete noire is also almost always an homme de paille (strawman).

Posted by dadanarchist | March 11, 2008 7:19 PM