GOP pirates of the Caribbean
Democrats must insist that not just Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth but the Republicans who voted to confirm him are complicit with murder and possible war crimes off the coast of South America
For months now, the U.S. military has attacked alleged drug trafficking vessels in both the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, killing at least 80 people in over 20 strikes. The campaign has been redolent of illegality, with the Trump administration unconvincingly claiming that drug traffickers and cartels pose an imminent threat to American lives akin to a foreign military force. Some Democrats have been emboldened to label the attacks as murder, and to persuade a number of Republicans to call for investigations into the campaign.
But with the Washington Post’s recent reporting that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to kill all individuals aboard the first boat to be attacked — allegedly leading the military commander in charge of the operation to order a second strike to finish off two survivors in the water — we are getting a clearer glimpse of the full extent of what has been wrought in the name of the American people. Legal experts had already argued that the killing of boat crews absent an armed conflict constituted murder; but the events of September 2 off the coast of Trinidad very conceivably constituted a war crime under the administration’s own dubious claims of an armed conflict with cartels, analogous to shooting a prisoner or an unarmed civilian.
If the U.S. government is committing crimes in our nation’s name, then it is in the interest of all of us that this mayhem cease, and the perpetrators be brought to justice. One should not have to put too much effort into explaining why unjustified killing is wrong; yet beyond this obvious moral point, the idea that the U.S. is killing those who pose no direct harm to our country means substituting bloodlust for a foreign policy that actually protects the American people.
In this case, given the degraded state of the executive branch, ending the murders at sea depends on the Trump administration paying a steep political price for its actions. As noted above, some Republican members of Congress had already criticized the killing spree; the news that the administration may be committing war crimes even within its blatantly self-justifying concept of a war with narco-traffickers has led more Republicans to speak out against such open crimes. This is tentatively a big deal; the idea that GOP elected officials would challenge Trump in his commander-in-chief role would have seemed pollyanish a year ago.
Moreover, the revelations should provide powerful ammunition to Democrats who have been harshly critical of the maritime strikes. Last week, I talked about how six Democratic congresspeople and senators had urged members of the U.S. military not to obey unlawful orders, a clear reference to these Latin American killings. In response, Donald Trump accused them of sedition and suggested they be put to death. At the time, Trump’s response was clearly outlandish and horrifying — but that outburst, as well as efforts to intimidate the six Democrats with investigations (and, in the case of Senator and former Navy officer Mark Kelly, a court martial), looks even worse given the seriousness of this latest news. Allegations of war crimes validate Democrats’ appeals to follow the law.
Even before these latest developments, the administration behaved as if it had something to hide, and needed to engage in abuses of power to intimidate its opponents. Now we have gotten a glimpse of the deeper horrors they sought to conceal. And the detailed reporting from the Washington Post in particular suggests that Pentagon and White House officials are leaking to reporters like a sieve, which augurs a virtuous circle in which Democratic efforts to press for the facts will encourage those in the know to speak to the press.
The Trump administration response signals that the president and his advisors understand their deep vulnerability — not just to charges of war crimes, but in relation to the entire murderous spree against supposed narco-traffickers. Hegseth himself has denied giving a verbal order to kill all those on the boat, while Trump has said he believes Hegseth’s denials. Additionally, the administration asserts that the commander of the operation, Admiral Frank M. Bradley, gave the order for a second attack, and that this strike was specifically to sink the ship completely, not to kill survivors.
Against these denials, however, any assessment of White House defenses must acknowledge not only this administration’s tendency to limitless lying, but how very much the attacks against alleged narco-traffickers are of a piece with Pete Hegseth’s repeated insistence that war-fighting is nearly exclusively about killing — or, as he put it recently it in pseudo-professional language, “lethal, kinetic strikes.” His central shtick has been to insist that the U.S. military be a ruthless killing machine, even using that obsession as an excuse to denigrate any efforts to encourage and honor non-male, non-white service members who he sees as lacking the martial virility of white men. In fact, Hegseth has been so committed to a vision of U.S. bloodlust unbound that he has urged pardons for convicted war criminals; in this, he found a sympathetic ear in the president, who indeed pardoned or offered relief for such convicts during his first term.
Yet, despite his grotesque history and aggro public persona, amidst his ongoing attempts to remake the military in his own twisted image, and after having helped implement a strategy of outright murder on the high seas, Pete Hegseth now asks us believe that he is the sort of guy who would never say “Kill them all.” Whether or not he is a true sociopath or merely longs to play one on TV, he may have finally joined the ranks of the war criminals he has long admired — or created the circumstances that encouraged a subordinate to do so.
The reports of war crimes should rightly bleed over into increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s insane intention to wage war against Venezuela. Just as murder has become U.S. policy in the waters of Latin America, an unprovoked, unjustified attack on Venezuela should be viewed as more of the same. The antiseptic term “regime change” obscures the violence that seems to be contemplated. “Murder” is a proper term for targeting citizens of a country that has not attacked or threatened the U.S., even if they are members of that country’s military; this should be all the clearer in the case of inevitable civilian casualties.
Again, Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on “lethality” above all else provides a useful perspective for understanding red flags common to the boat attacks and any action against Venezuela. For instance, the notion that the U.S. should simply blow up vessels with missiles, rather than capture their crews and reap the intelligence gains, is certainly a choice — a choice that privileges violent spectacle over actual, effective strategy. We should rightly worry that the same incompetent insistence that war primarily involves violence, even at the expense of actual strategy, would apply to any action in Venezuela.
But though Pete Hegseth is squarely at the center of this horror show, he is closely surrounded by a phalanx of enablers that includes not only the president who empowered him despite the degradation of the U.S. military he clearly promised, but also every Republican senator who voted to confirm him in full knowledge of his unfitness. His lamentable alcoholism; his low moral character; his white nationalist sympathies; and, most overwhelmingly, his fondness for those who commit war crimes and his determination to pervert the American military into an incubator of future war criminals: all were readily apparent. Whether they voted to confirm him in full agreement with what he promised, or out of fear of crossing Trump, their complicity with the killings in the Caribbean is a stone cold fact.
That some GOP senators and other Republican elected officials are raising questions now might well be good for the larger cause of checking Donald Trump — but Democrats must be deft enough to make them pay a huge political price for getting us into this situation to begin with. Present alarm regarding war crimes hardly absolves Republicans from having put a lover of war criminals into an unmerited position of power. In this one respect only, the Democrats should take a page from Pete Hegseth: in holding the GOP to account, from the president to GOP senators and water-carrying representatives, the Democratic Party should not hesitate to take no prisoners, to throw aside an outdated bipartisanship and deny the Republicans any shred of redemption for the crises they have made possible, and that they now own.