The Invisible Soldiers by Ann Hagedorn

Author:Ann Hagedorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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A THICKET OF IRONIES

In The Irony of American History, the eminent American ethicist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described irony as the unexpected incongruities in life that upon closer examination are not so incongruous after all. For example, he wrote, “ If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits—in all such cases the situation is ironic.”

In the story of the rise of private military and security companies, irony was abundant. That an industry making its living from instability and conflict called itself “the peace and stability industry” was perhaps the most obvious example. That a soldier in the U.S. Special Forces whose dream of becoming an SF officer was shattered by a bullet shot by a man working for a company employed by the soldier’s government, a company that was part of an industry rooted in the history of Special Forces, was another. And the fact that the U.S. State Department defined democracies around the world as those nations in which militaries were accountable to civil authority, while in the United States there were private militaries sometimes legally unaccountable to civil authority, was yet another.

For Aegis and for Spicer, an ironic situation surfaced in August 2010 when Aegis established a new nonoperating holding company in Basel, Switzerland, and newspaper headlines branded the company “ a mercenary outfit.” In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Swiss were renowned for their excellent mercenaries; the nation has the oldest mercenary unit still in operation—the Swiss Guards protecting the Vatican. Still, Swiss politicians fretted over the arrival of what they publicly referred to as “the mercenary Aegis.” The Swiss foreign minister even commissioned a probe into how the presence of such a firm might affect the world’s perception of Swiss military neutrality. Could Aegis truly be called a “mercenary outfit”?

Earlier in the year, at hearings of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting on Capitol Hill, a University of Maryland professor had asked Aegis LLC’s president, Kristi Clemens Rogers, if Tim Spicer was a mercenary. She did not deny that he had been a mercenary in his past, but, she explained, he had acted only on behalf of “ governments that were Western-Allied governments.” Very soon, however, it wouldn’t really matter what the PMSCs were called. “Everyone was busy trying to identify, label, vilify what was really part of the past, the dogs of war,” said Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, “while something big had developed that obviously needed to be dealt with. Whether you called it mercenary or not it was happening.”

The mercenary scare in Switzerland that August was an event of minor significance, for, as Kaptur said, things were happening on a grander scale, though unnoticed, and greater ironies were taking shape. While President Obama told Americans about the

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