America has never been even close to perfect, a fact which the Trump administration is going to great lengths to obscure. They insist that any mention of the country’s flawed history demeans and ignores what it has done right and therefore it must not be mentioned at all. In truth the president believes that the simplified “George Washington and the cherry tree” fables he learned as a boy in the 1950s is all anyone needs to know. The consequences of this ignorance are putting the country, and the entire world, in grave danger.
Setting aside his grade school level understanding of history, had Trump joined many of the rest of his generation in protesting the war in Vietnam, for instance, or his father had not arranged for him to get a fake medical deferment to avoid the draft, perhaps he would have a grasp of the folly that led to that tragic event which cost the lives of nearly 60,000 Americans and the lives of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. And he would understand that creating a pretext for war leads to disaster.
The U.S. got militarily involved in Vietnam in the 1950s as part of the Cold War, anti-communist crusade coming out of the stalemate in Korea. The “domino theory” held that they had to stop the spread with Vietnam lest all the countries around it and eventually God knows how many other countries would fall over one-by-one.
By 1964, with “military advisers'” heavily involved in the civil war on the side of the South Vietnamese government against the communist insurgents of the North, it was foolishly decided that the U.S. needed to send troops into the country to put an end to it once and for all. So, they used two isolated incidents of North Vietnamese patrol boats attacking a Naval destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify it.
It was only later that the country learned that there had only been one incidental attack and the second was simply made up as a pretext to call it a provocation that required a massive U.S. response. President Johnson ordered U.S. Navy planes to bomb North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and called on the Congress to authorize the use of force, which it did. Within a few months there were more than 100,000 troops on the ground in that small Southeast Asian country. We all know how it turned out.
Unfortunately, certain American leaders learned all the wrong lessons from that debacle. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government had little trouble getting approval to invade Afghanistan to go after the perpetrators. But they wanted to use the war fever gripping the country to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks but which had been on the radar of a group of right wing hawks ever since the first Gulf War in 1991. They manipulated intelligence to create a pretext for war that was just as thin as the Tonkin Gulf resolution and after a lengthy and vociferous debate managed to get the Congress to once again authorize the use of force. We all know how that turned out too.
As bad as both of these infamous examples of government lying the nation into war were, they at least attempted to adhere to the idea that they were expected to follow international and domestic law and that they needed to go to Congress for authorization. It wasn’t much. They failed to get declarations of war as the Constitution requires. But they knew it was important to preserve the idea of an actual legal authority to use military force, however ludicrous it might be.
The Trump administration has decided that’s a waste of time. This president believes he has unlimited power, answerable to no one, and he is not required to even pretend that he needs any authority other than his own decree to do anything. That odious power grab has now escalated to military action.
Over the course of the last few weeks the administration has been gathering warships offshore of Venezuela in a major deployment and last week a U.S. Navy ship blew up a suspected drug-running boat off Venezuela, killing its crew of 11. The president proudly released the video of what can only be called a murder by the U.S. government posting on Truth Social that it was done “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
The “War on Drugs” has always been a metaphor, not a real military conflict. The government has authorized covert action over the years but officially it’s always been a law enforcement issue in which the Coast Guard would arrest suspected drug runners and turn them over to the authorities. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press that such interdiction doesn’t work: “What will stop them is when you blow them up…. Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now.”
Experts in the laws of war are hard pressed to come up with any legal justification for this. Simply designating the Tren de Aragua gang a foreign terrorist organization doesn’t do it just because the administration says so. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 wouldn’t work either, especially since the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just blocked it’s use for deportations holding that there is no “predatory incursion” or “invasion” by members of the gang. If it’s just about drug dealers, it’s a criminal matter and the U.S. has decided it has the right to summarily execute them without any due process, something that got former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte arrested by the Philippine National Police and Interpol in Operation Pursuit last March under an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant charging him with crimes against humanity
Back in the day, the government would have said the boat tried to attack the American ship and it blew it up in self-defense. They aren’t bothering anymore with such old-fashioned justifications. When asked under what legal authority they took this action, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply said, “We have the absolutely and complete authority.” Vice President J.D. Vance was asked the same question gave an equally vacuous answer: “The legal authority is there are people who are bringing — literal terrorists — who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”
Blowing up drug traffickers in waters off of Venezuela, saying they’re invading the United States is ridiculous. What makes more sense is that this is really a provocation to try to get Venezuela to attack one of the warships and set off a regime change operation. (Sound familiar at all?) Rubio has apparently been pushing for this large military deployment to pressure Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro (who currently has a $50 million bounty on his head.) Venezuela, after all, has a whole lot of oil and the peacenik Donald Trump has been itching for his own war for a very long time. Let’s just hope that Venezuela doesn’t take the bait.
Salon