This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
But experts say that Wagner’s top officers have participated in meetings between foreign leaders and top Russian officials.
Erik Prince, whom I did not see mentioned in this story. Nor was there any mention of extensive use of mercenaries by the United States in the wars under Dubya.
Sigh. Can we please kill the false equivalences? No, our private military contractors are not at all akin to what the russians are doing with the wagner group.
The contractors we had in Iraq weren’t just running around waging war, they were there for specific things like providing security to people and companies. Even the infamous incident was a convoy that they were running security for and there was a panic.
Wagner group is fielding full armies on the ground conducting the full range of war operations, along with a ton of war crimes all well under the radar.
This “but we do it too” is a false equivalence and really gets tiring.
BuT we DO it alSO
Where’s Blackwater when ya needs 'em?
“X” marks the spot.
The US is not in a position to stop the “growth of a shadowy Russian Private Army” phrasing it that way is exactly the kind of cheap shot the GOP loves.
We dealt we these worthless pos’ in Syria, and they paid heavily.
This guy is a Prince!
Russian mercenaries as murderous thugs, I never thought it could be possible.
I was also wondering what ties Prince has to the Wagner group.
Russia for years has exploited the edges of a nation-state system, through the Wagner group and “little green men” in Eastern Ukraine. And the pummeling the Russians are taking right now is probably a sign, the Russians will conclude, of how they should have stuck to that strategy.
Bing-f*cking-go !!
Yeah, a clown prince.
Well…the moral and ethical and legal differences are not that great; assigning state military objectives to private, unaccountable, unregulated actors is just plain bad news, whoever does it.
The difference seems to be mostly in scale. The U.S. used mercenaries as frosting on the cake, where Russia employs them as the entire dessert.
And, the Russians are doing it a lot around the world the U.S. seems to have learned a lesson from Iraq, maybe.
So, I would say it’s a largely false equivalence, but certainly not a totally incorrect comparison.
Not at all. We don’t have US-sanctioned mercenaries running around battlefields attacking the enemy.
We do have private security contractors that are protecting NGOs and other people operating in tough environments, that’s purely a defensive posture and is something done by everyone including your local rent-a-cop at the mall.
There is no valid comparison between what we have in operation and the wagner group and associated mercenaries hired to conduct offensive operations and directly wage war.
Blackwater wasn’t there on missions to take out terrorists, they were on missions to protect specific customers. Yes, got trigger-happy, and were shut down, not celebrated, but they were certainly not on an offensive movement when they got scared and started shooting everyone around them.
During the Cold War, America’s policy of containing the spread of Soviet communism led to a substantial investment in courting African leaders, offering developmental aid, university exchange programs, even concerts. But when the Berlin Wall fell, so too did the U.S. government’s interest in the African continent, the officials told ProPublica.
This is true but omits how awful many of those leaders were and are. The US backed a lot of leaders with vicious records because they portrayed themselves as anti-communists. After the Cold War we could pull back and lean into human rights more.
Now we’re in the unenviable position of either supporting those kind of leaders again (and getting criticized from the left for it), or sitting back and watching even worse things unfold as described in the article. Often there’s no good way forward, as in Libya and Mali.
Yeah, I would say that we at least temporarily stymied their growth when we shelled and bombed the shit out of the psychopaths as they massed for an attack on an outnumbered U.S. position in plain view, arrogantly assuming the country that pretty much invented the concept of “firepower” wasn’t going to do anything about it.
And by “arrogantly assuming,” I, of course, mean “assuming Trump was going to order them to lie down and get slaughtered.”
No, our PMCs aren’t equivalent, but they do seriously undercut us on any attempt at a principled stand against use of mercenaries. Because they are mercs—they were providing operational firepower in a theatre of war, even if the ‘operation’ was convoy escort and and heavily-armed-mall-cops. Sure, they’re generally more principled mercs, and they’re usually held accountable when shit like the Baghdad shootings happened, but they do provide the opening for ‘the US does it too’. And no matter how tenuous the comparison or how utterly bullshit it might be, we’re not dealing with facts, we’re dealing with politics.
And I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, man. It’s the flip side of the same discussion we keep having w/damned near everyone else here about ‘please be accurate with your firearm terminology, or your good and important ideas get ignored by the people who need to hear them the most’. It was a stupid move on our part to open that door, because it’s easily twisted and misrepresented. And just like so much else of the Bush II Presidency… anyone could have seen this kind of unintended consequences coming and called it out at the time, and a lot of us did.
We did ourselves no favors, and if we want to be able to draw a bright line, we need to recommit to no PMC use.
