Getting the military used to murder

The drug boat strikes could be the thin end of the wedge

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Over the past few days, the Trump regime has stepped up its attacks on so-called “narcoterrorists”, striking a number of boats in the Pacific near Mexico’s territorial waters. The total number of dead from the strikes is now at least 60, and that’s just based on the figures that the U.S. is itself giving us.

Let’s get one thing clear: These strikes are murder. The boats being attacked are civilian vessels and the people on them are civilians. They are not members of an armed force with which the United States is at war, or indeed any armed force at all. They may be drug traffickers, but the penalty for drug trafficking is generally not death. Even if it was, someone would need to go through a judicial process before facing that penalty.

The law still applies to members of the U.S. armed forces. They cannot murder a civilian, in international waters or anywhere else, with impunity. If you kill someone in international waters, then you can be tried under the laws of the vessel’s flag nation, or in your own jurisdiction. On top of general laws against murder, U.S. domestic law bans assassinations, and U.S. military law itself bans murder. This is not some grey area. It is an open and shut case.

All of this is bad enough, but what worries me about it is something else: its ability over the long-term to corrode the U.S. military, and the U.S. military’s relationship with the civilian world.

Stripped down to the bones, two things are happening right now. The first is that the Trump regime is habituating at least some part of the military and the civilian Pentagon to involvement in murdering civilians in cold blood. And the second is that they are habituating the rest of us into powerlessly watching it happen.

They have chosen to start, as they have in some many other areas, with targets that are somewhat hard to defend. Anyone whose concern for the rule of law causes them to speak out against this is immediately met with the response “oh, so you don’t want to stop drug trafficking?”

It’s extremely cheap, but not entirely ineffective, politics. One thing that MAGA has exposed is that a large number of Americans have only a vague and insubstantial commitment to the rule of law or democracy as abstract principles. They can be persuaded to discard those commitments if they view the payoff as high enough - and the payoff doesn’t even have to be that high.

As soon as they have started down this road, whoever the first targets are, they have begun to build an apparatus of consent.

These strikes are the work of many hands. Someone is loading the ordinance, piloting it to its destination, and pulling the trigger. Lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel and the Pentagon have had to write justifications for why these strikes are supposedly acceptable. Press officers are drafting defenses of the strikes, and spokespeople are going out and delivering them. Intelligence agencies are carrying out damage assessments, sweeping the scene for indications of whether an unlawful killing was successful or not, hoping it was. The muscle memory of murder is being built.

Another problem with going down this road is that it will tend to lead many good people - the ones who don’t want to be murderers - to leave. The admiral in charge of Southern Command, Alvin Holsey, has already announced that he will be retiring at the end of this year. Others may follow, or quietly ask for transfers. Many good people, of course, will not leave - they have families to support, and will come up with other excuses to themselves. Needing to hold onto their careers and sense of self, they will get used to the idea that the ends justifies the means in more ways than one.

This habituation of the military to murder is matched by the habituation of civilians to watching it happen. These strikes are happening in full view of the world. No attempt is even being made to hide them. The White House Press Secretary openly boasts of them, adding the detail that at no point did the people killed pose any threat to U.S. forces - as if this makes the situation better, rather than being another piece of evidence that these are cold-blooded killings. In response to this, every other institution is powerless to stop them. Congress and the courts express concern and do nothing. Rights organizations shout into the void. Polls seem to show public support, at least for now.

The current situation is bad enough, but we should also ask what else can be accomplished with that apparatus of consent over the longer term. What else might it be used to plan and execute, at home or abroad? We have to wait and see with baited breath. We have sadly become habituated to that, too.