That Time Blackwater and US Army Shot Each Other Up
Remember Blackwater's march on Pentagon under Bush?
It's June 2006, the height of the Iraq War. Luckily for you, you're not an orphan in Fallujah, but just another suburbanite in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It's a sleepy summer Saturday morning.
As you're browsing the morning paper, your child is flipping channels. As he does so you catch half a second of a Bush speech. You'd normally never subject yourself to a Dubya speech, but this is unusual — why would the President be giving a speech at such an early hour? You tell the kid to switch back and your jaw drops.
Bush says that amid a tough and existential struggle against terrorism, a new Benedict Arnold has emerged to stab the nation in the back, to bring anarchy, fratricide, surrender and defeat. In light of that, Bush has issued orders to the DoD to deal harshly with this deadly internal threat. All who have taken up arms against the United States in this criminal and traitorous adventure consciously will answer to the people and be punished.
What the hell is going on? Civil war??? Bush mentions Blackwater and that Savannah has fallen but offers no specifics. You scramble to the internet to find out what's going on.
Turns out Blackwater is patrolling the streets of Savannah, has set up checkpoints around the city, and has even cordoned off the 4-star US Army general in the nearby Fort Stewart HQ along with his staff, effectively subjecting him to house arrest. What is more, 4000 Blackwaterites are marching up north from Savannah toward Arlington and Washington. Their stated goal is subjecting DoD chief Donald Rumsfeld to the same sort of house arrest and forcing his dismissal, but speculation is rife they're hoping their dash to the capital area destabilizes and topples Bush himself.
This might normally be called a mutiny, but seeing Blackwater is a separate organization from the US military, and a private one at that, the proper term is a coup. Like some hapless Panamanian, you now have the dubious privilege of watching the progress of a coup in motion against your national government in real-time. A coup that will determine your future, and of your country, and that you're helpless to influence. Unthinkable! What has this country sunk to?!
As you try to follow the advance of the Blackwater column on the interwebs, the news comes in. The mercenaries have shot down a US Army helicopter. And another. And another. US Army deaths are almost certain. And in an hour or two the private army will be passing through your Fayetteville.
Indeed, just as they enter your town they blow out a USAF surveillance plane out of the sky above it, as videos of the incident that hit your Facebook soon confirm. The fuckers! You aren't even that much of a support-the-troops guy, you were never for the war in the first place, you backed Howard Dean. But this is too much! Somebody is killing US military men right on US soil — and it's a fucking corporation!
You never thought you'd say this but this is one Bush war you're going to support! Dubya, go and ring Erik Prince's neck! Crush these merc killers of troops! Sure, after it’s done Bush will have to answer for allowing the situation to get so far from under him, and for getting in bed with these entitled criminals in the first place, but for now, he needs to do as promised and unleash the Pentagon against these murder yuppies!
Your first foray into backing a Bush war does not go too well. As far as you can see resistance to Blackwater consists of local mayors taking the initiative to improvise makeshift roadblocks, and Army engineers reportedly blowing up a few bridges. There are a few videos of what seems to be an aircraft targeting the Blackwater column, but it appears others were downed “preemptively” without ever firing on the mercenaries. There is talk of a “defensive line” being constructed but that is only at Washington outskirts. If after the jaw-dropping “stab in the back” speech you expected a Bush hammer to come down on Blackwater there isn't one in sight, which allows the 4000-merc column to cover 1000 km from Savannah to Virginia, coming within 300 km of the capital, mainly unopposed.
Instead, come evening, the exact opposite news hits. After the mediation of Tony Blair an agreement has been reached and Bush, the United States government, Erik Prince and Blackwater are back to being friends and back in business. Blackwater recruitment billboards that authorities had started to take down are being put right back up, and the Blackwater skyscraper in New York that was closed by the police is right back to being open again.
What the bloody hell?! After that speech on how the wartime backstabbers will face the punishment of the people? After the Blackwaterites shot up to half a dozen US aircraft, killing at least a dozen US airmen in a day?? They're going right back on the taxpayer payroll?? What kind of a godawful banana republic is this?!?
It was bad enough to hire private mercenaries in the first place, as if you are some medieval princehood. But to then let the mercs get so emboldened that they launch a coup against you is another level of bananization. But to then forgive them their coup attempt and the deaths of loyal military men — after you thundered that the criminal traitors would be dealt with severely — is a level of bananization not thought possible. George W. Bush, what have you done to this once semi-serious government and state?!
(Not to worry, Prince soon declares the families of fallen loyal airmen will receive "compensation" from his coffers as if America has regressed to the customs of Dark Age tribes.)
The epilogue to the story comes two months later. Blackwater is back to being legal and in business with the United States Government and Dubya, albeit only for tasks outside Iraq. It is also so confident that it brazenly violates the terms of the Tony Blair agreement and is humiliating Bush daily.
Most notably under the agreement Erik Prince must remain in exile in Canada and run Blackwater dealings with USG from there, but instead he continues openly flying in and out of the States at a whim, even attending public events, and publicizing it all through his Blackwater media. It is only then that during one such flight a US missile is fired destroying Prince's plane, killing him, along with a number of other top Blackwaterites — and the flight attendant and civilian pilots. The crash is proclaimed an accident and Bush proclaims himself innocent of having anything to do with it.
Now, as a Fayetteville suburbanite, how would you feel about this? You would probably feel that in and of itself Blackwater finally being taken down a peg was probably a good thing. But at the same time, that Prince could have gotten away with killing US military men scot-free (if only he stopped there) would probably be taken as an extremely worrying sign of America's bananization under Bush. Moreover that Bush, once he did crack down on Prince, did not do so with legal and overt police means, but with an assassination outside the law, might be understood as yet another blow to the United States as a non-banana state.
As we all know the insane events described above never happened. In June 2006 Blackwater did not go on a 1000-kilometer thunder run for the American capital, shooting down US aircraft along the way, and threatening to capture Donald Rumsfeld. But exactly these events did take place if you change June 2006 for June 2023, America for Russia, George W Bush for Putin, Blackwater for Wagner, Erik Prince for Yevgeny Prigozhin, Rumsfeld for Sergei Shoigu, Tony Blair for Aleksandr Lukashenko, and Canada for Belarus.
Yes, Russia hired private mercenaries. Then these mercenaries eventually went on a coup rampage killing its troops. Then Russia amnestied them, on that very same day that the president had taken the unprecedented step to appear on TV screens in the morning calling for the people to rally against these villains.
Then after the amnesty, the mercenary leadership continued to humiliate the Russian president, who only then belatedly ordered a shy, covert move against them which he still officially denies.
Truth is stranger than fiction, ha?
What does it tell us that this insane course of events took place? Many things that countless words could be written about, but here and now let's only mention a few.
1. Putin's Wagner experiment blew up in Russia's face faster and in a more insane way than anyone could have predicted. With a rebellion and clashes with loyal Russian troops. With a 4000-strong column racing for Moscow to test the mettle and the cohesion of the Putin government. Putin's own favored mercenaries who received such privileges from him then posed the most existential threat to him yet.
I can not claim to be familiar with the entire internet, but of the commentators I am aware of I was the only one who spent substantial time warning that the privileges being hurled upon the private Wagner mercenary corporation were hollowing out the Russian state and leading to its extreme bananization. This did not win me any popularity contests, but it turns out the only way I was "wrong" was in not predicting just how soon and just how incredibly forcefully my worries would be proven to be well-founded.
I being a voice in the desert and then being vindicated has long become a theme, but it is impossible to take joy in vindications when every one of them has come at Russia's expense. Just once I would like to say X is not going in a good direction, and then be proven wrong as X works wonderfully. At the same time, I would advise interdweebs that these disasters did not come about because I warned about them, but because a certain connoisseur of botox in the Kremlin caused them. Direct rage where it is appropriate.
2. Once again Putin was all too willing to walk over the bodies of his pilots to conclude a deal with their killers. In 2015 Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 on the Syrian border killing the pilot in what was a carefully pre-planned ambush ordered from above. After half a year of tomato sanctions Putin was back to licking ice cream with Erdogan and marketing S-300 to NATO Turkey, the murder of the Russian pilot forgiven.
This time around the number of slain airmen— who had taken to air to their deaths to defend Putin's right to name his own Defense Minister — exceeded a dozen, yet by the end of the day Putin was striking a deal with their killer he had just styled a national traitor.
This is symptomatic of a wider trend where the botox lover in the Kremlin constantly betrays, lays traps for, and casually consumes precisely the most patriotic parts of Russia's society and the most pro-Russian populations beyond its borders that an actual nationalist leader would most value and protect. But this is a huge topic in need of its own essay.
3. Finally, an important thing the Wagner putsch tells us is that Vladimir is a class-A clown. There is no longer any justification whatsoever to regard him as anything but. Any other position is untenable. No excuses, no rationalizations. Had the events described above taken place in the US we would know precisely what to think. Had things developed to where 4000 Blackwaterites marched along the Eastern Seaboard shooting down USAAF aircraft aiming to detain Donald Rumsfeld, we would correctly take it as the final irreversible proof that George W. Bush is a failure, a disaster, an idiot. An even bigger one than we already thought. But even in Bush's days such a surreal event did not take place. Even Bush managed not to fall to quite so idiotic lows. But not Vladimir Clown Putin.
There can't be an exotification of Russia to where what would be such an indictment of Bush can pass as no big deal in Russia. A putschist mercenary corporation is an entirely novel concept for Russia and one that nobody had on the cards before clown Putin got to cooking. Recall that his patronage of the merc snakes went so far as to give Wagner inmates from prisons who were promised a pardon upon survival of a six-month tour in Ukraine. Just imagine if Bush had emptied federal prisons to swell the ranks of — not of the Army with its military police and military tribunals — but of a private mercenary company that has to be paid hefty government contracts.
The Russian military has the richest history in the world of deploying convict manpower. So why favor a private company with zero such experience over it? Unlike Blackwater, Wagner under Russian law was actually illegal the whole time, yet was somehow able to exist, to advertise, to be contracted by the government, and to finally be gifted penal manpower from the custody of the state.
With Wagner receiving the signal that its existence in a space where law didn’t apply was an asset to Russia, can anyone really blame it for launching a coup and killing military personnel along the way? After all, in the system that Putin shaped Wagner would see that laws and rules existed for most people, but not for Putin or Wagner. They alone were special categories.
Ironically, the mad dash on Moscow that Wagner would launch was a carbon copy of the SMO Putin launched on Kiev. Just like Putin, Wagner had a fairly vague idea of what its goal was, and an even vaguer idea of how to bring it about. The idea was to subject the government to a stress test. To race on Moscow and see if that spread paralysis, panic and flight in the Putin government. In other words, it was a stunt, a psychological operation to see if the opposition would defeat itself.
A slight difference is that Putin devoted two entire Military Districts (out of four) to the march on Kiev and failed, but Wagner sent 4000 men and got Putin to blink. In 2021 Zelensky refused to do a Ghani and flee or to offer any worthwhile concessions leaving Putin with nothing to show for it.* (Except a missed opportunity, the two districts could have helped encircle the one-third of the Ukrainian army left exposed in the southeast.)
But on the other hand, when he himself was faced with (a much punnier) dash on his capital, the botox man promptly re-embraced the attackers he had just told the entire nation were the vilest of traitors. As one old Wagnerite commented as the day concluded: "We won. In the morning we were terrorists, now they’re back to calling us heroes.”
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1674118049975214081
https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1673011508559638529
https://twitter.com/sambendett/status/1672600151909707778
https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1673367544323874816
https://twitter.com/301military/status/1672548498938404867
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1672605975629422599
https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1672727525921808386
https://twitter.com/VivekSi85847001/status/1672561928286371842
* To be fair to Vladimir Clown, the mad dash on Kiev failed because it was meant to merely complement the uprising, sabotage, and desertion by a clandestine network that FSB thought it had built in the Ukrainian capital. Of course, designing military plans around FSB boasts is a circus discipline all by itself.
Great piece, Marko. I've greatly missed your perspective on the world!
Hellcome back Marko. I have been begging for your return to blogging for months through Riley and Rolo substacks for months.
I hope the Worst of All Worlds is back.