White Man's Burden
War crimes as a national sport
Patriotism may indeed to be the last refuge for a scoundrel, as Samuel Johson once wrote, but Pete Hegseth – that poster boy for white entitlement – did the cantankerous wordsmith one better. Rather than wait, Hegseth starts off by using patriotism as a rationale not for the actions of a scoundrel, but for those of a war criminal.
Clearly, we are not in a declared war with Venezuela and if there are drugs being carried by basically defenseless fishing boats, there are conventional ways of dealing with them – stopping them, boarding them, confiscating evidence, and prosecuting those on board.
Such a civilized approach won’t do for the slick Hegseth whose hair glistens with testosterone-laced gel. Nope, we are going to bomb them to kingdom come. No survivors. Kill them all. If they want to distribute illegal drugs, they should do it the right way: become president of Honduras and then get a presidential pardon.
Surprisingly, such an attitude can lead to excess. And now we have believable accusations that in one of the attacks on sea-going vessels, the initial destruction wasn’t quite enough. So, when two survivors were seen clinging to wreckage of the crafts, America’s airborne military might was unleashed to kill them as well.
We ain’t messin’ around, as the swaggering Hegseth is apt to say. Except there are at least two problems. First, if this boat wasn’t part of a direct threat to the United States, then the wanton killing of the crew is cold-blooded murder.
Second, even in the doubtful event that the fishing boat bombing could be described as a wartime event, there are well-recognized international rules that forbid the killing of enemy combatants who are incapable of inflicting harm, such as those who are unarmed, or those who have surrendered -- or, those who are clinging to the wreckage of their destroyed vessel.
Those who engage in such murderous atrocities are generally judged to be guilty of war crimes, even when a war has been legally declared and recognized, which is hardly the case here. We are as much at war with Venezuela as Albania was at war with Azerbaijan which, in our current Mad Hatter world, is a war that Trump claimed to end. In a sense, he is right in that they are not fighting. Of course, they never were and it is even money that Trump couldn’t find either country on a map. Perhaps he was thinking of Azerbaijan and Armenia, neighbors that do have a history of fighting. They haven’t stopped. And Trump can’t find Armenia on a map, either.
In the wake of credible accusations, Hegseth could have reassured Americans that we weren’t engaged in war crimes, that we would never condone the killing of hapless humans adrift at sea, and that he would conduct an exhaustive investigation to make sure this hadn’t happened and to ensure that all under his command understood that as secretary of defense, he demanded strict adherence to the rules of war.
Instead, in classic non-denial denial form, he trotted out the tired “fake news” claim and charged that critics were sullying the name of our brave soldiers. Nothing of the sort was true.
First, there is nothing brave about dive-bombing virtually defenseless shipping boats, much less killing off people clinging to life at sea. Second, no one questioned the military’s braveness. They did question an administration that placed our brave military in the unnecessary position of following their obligation to duty versus the committing of cold-blooded murder. Such struggles usually end up badly. I’m old enough to have lived through coverage of the My Lai Massacre, which one guesses Hegseth would shrug off as aggressive actions by real-men warriors.
Hegseth makes a big deal about creating a warrior mentality in a military that he claims, without evidence, has gone soft because of DEI mandates. He rejects as radical the belief that non-whites and non-males can be effective in the armed service. Too many “woke” promotions, he says.
Which is an odd claim for a man who was catapulted to be secretary of defense with a work record that included hosting a bombastic TV show, drinking way too much, and several allegations of sexual assault, which he denies but in at least one case paid $50,000 to one of his accusers. In that case, the woman told police that he attacked her in a California hotel room in 2017 after he took her phone, locked the door, and refused to let her leave. Manly stuff, for sure. Warrior-like.
Can you imagine a Black man or a white woman with such a background achieving such a high-level post – I mean besides Clarence Thomas or Linda (A-One) McMahon?
The allegations of an anti-military bias are strange considering the history of Donald Trump who frequently degrades the military. Trump, recall, said he knew more about ISIS than all of the U.S. generals.
Beyond that pomposity, and more troubling, are the allegations that he demeans men in the military, particularly those who get killed, injured, or captured. John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general, was Trump’s White House chief of staff, so hardly a daintily-knickered liberal. He alleged, and others backed him up, that Trump referred to killed soldiers as “suckers” and didn’t want the bad optics of visiting a hospital with wounded and disfigured soldiers.
Such allegations gain credence when Trump himself mocked prisoners of war – he prefers soldiers who don’t get captured – and who suggested an execution was appropriate for General Mark Milley, a war hero and Trump’s appointee as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Adulation of America’s men in military is apparently a fluid thing.
Meanwhile, we all have to live with the fact that we are the nation that murders defenseless men clinging to wreckage in the middle of the ocean. That’s who we are. Trump and Hegseth merely glorify it.