W.J. Hennigan makes the mistake of accepting Trump’s framing of his Caribbean murder spree as an armed conflict:
The Trump administration told Congress this week that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.
The average American knows vanishingly little about what its government seeks to accomplish in this fight. Citizens aren’t in possession of the metrics by which to judge the administration’s pursuit of those goals.
We haven’t been told which specific drugs they seek to stop. We haven’t been told much about which specific groups they seek to destroy. We haven’t been told much about what legal authorities they are acting on.
Withholding this information from the American public is the administration’s way to escape scrutiny. At the very least, the country deserves some evidence of whether the military operation is working.
The Trump administration hasn’t kept the public informed about the “conflict” beyond boasting about the killing, but that’s because there is no conflict and everything they have said to justify their actions is a lie. The president is arbitrarily having civilians murdered and then bragging about it to the world, and we’re supposed to be concerned about not having the “metrics” to judge whether the murder spree is successful? The administration could provide made-up answers to all of these questions, but it wouldn’t make the policy any more defensible or legal.
If this were a remotely legitimate use of the military, Hennigan’s practical objections and demands for greater transparency would make sense. There is nothing legitimate about any of this. The designations of cartels and gangs as terrorist organizations are nonsense, and those designations don’t give the president license to use the military against them in any case. The president is not an absolute ruler. He cannot be permitted to have people summarily executed on his whim.
Hennigan writes, “It’s good that Mr. Trump has decided to inform Congress that the U.S. military is engaged in an armed conflict.” This is not a good thing. There is no conflict. There is just one-sided killing of civilians. The president is trying to dress up his murders as a legitimate use of force, and they aren’t. If there really were a conflict, the president shouldn’t be informing Congress after he already started it. If there were a legitimate reason to conduct a military campaign in the Caribbean, the president should seek Congressional authorization first. Trump’s belated notice to Congress that he decided to start killing civilians in the name of fighting drug smuggling is an affront to our constitutional system.
It is true that murdering civilians on boats isn’t going to make a dent in the drug trade, but dwelling on the attacks’ ineffectiveness misses the point. The administration has no evidence that these attacks are “working,” but we shouldn’t care if they did have some. Does murdering civilians “work”? That is obviously the wrong question. The only question we should be asking is when Congress will remove the president from office for his crimes.
