Obviously, the US government shouldn’t be involved in the commission of war crimes.

Alas, the reality is that the US military commits combat atrocities fairly often, sometimes wittingly, other times not, but acts illegal under some statute or frowned upon by some manual all the same.

You could argue — indeed, you’d be hard pressed not to argue — that the entire Iraq War constituted one giant war crime. The same could plausibly be argued of Vietnam. Likewise America’s role in facilitating the collapse of the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya. And on and on.

Within conflicts, war crimes are of course commonplace. For every My Lai and Haditha — which is to say for every incident the public’s eventually made aware of — countless atrocities go undiscovered and undocumented, and their perpetrators unaccountable.

The reality’s as brutal as it is simple: There are no “rules” for the quasi-Hobbesian scenario that is war. You can purport to prescribe a set of rules, but you can’t realistically enforce them.

Without wanting to conjure the macabre, if you leave young men to their own devices in distant (and sometimes wholly remote) places where the odds of their behavior being scrutinized are vanishingly small, and then you introduce the adrenaline that goes along with being shot at and blown up, those young men are going to do some very bad things occasionally. More than occasionally, even. Haditha’s a testament to that.

Separately — i.e., as distinct from murder, rape and pillage in the delirious fog of life-or-death combat — the US regularly kills innocents while attempting to target bad guys. The drone program’s notorious for collateral damage. In 2021, for example, the Biden administration accidentally killed 10 civilians, including seven children, after mistaking an aid worker loading containers of water into the trunk of his Toyota for an ISIS member rigging the vehicle with explosives.

There’s no nice way to say this, so I’ll just say it the uncouth way: Shit happens. It’s awful, it’s criminal and if there were such a thing as Hell, everyone involved would surely be headed straight there, with perhaps some “upstairs” intervention on a case-by-case basis to account for complete accidents where even the availability of near perfect information couldn’t have forestalled a tragedy.

The Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean are total non sequiturs in this discussion. Either we think it’s acceptable for the US military to kill drug runners or we don’t, and it’s a separate discussion from anything to do with war.

Naive though this might be, we have to assume Donald Trump’s telling the truth about the boats being drug vessels. If he’s not (i.e., if they aren’t drug vessels) then Pete Hegseth’s systematically murdering random people. Much as I don’t care for the guy, I don’t believe that’s the case. That’s not to say innocents haven’t died in the strikes, it’s just to say I doubt seriously that Trump directed the Pentagon to systematically murder people he knows to be innocent.

This debate took on a new sense of urgency after The Washington Post reported that Special Operations commander Frank M. Bradley, who oversaw the first attack on the alleged drug boats in early September, fired on attack survivors in an apparent attempt to comply with a verbal order from Hegseth to kill everyone on board.

If true, Bradley could be in trouble because, without going into the legal specifics, you can’t execute the shipwrecked regardless of the circumstances. I didn’t initially cover the Post‘s reporting because it seemed like an attempt to paint Hegseth as a murderer instead of a moron.

What actually happened on September 2 was (probably) as follows. Hegseth, in keeping with his penchant for overwrought bravado, said something to the effect of, “Drug smugglin’ bastards! Kill ’em all!” and Bradley, being a military man, took that literally and unequivocally. So, when he noticed a couple of the supposed drug runners survived the initial strike, he killed them too consistent with the order of his superior who in this case happened to be the Secretary of Defense (sorry, the Secretary of War).

That version was all but confirmed this week when five officials who spoke to The New York Times said that in fact, Hegseth never “specifically address[ed] what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things,” where “those things” means the boat, the drugs and the people on the boat with the drugs, were all destroyed. The same sources told the Times that Hegseth’s order “was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.”

For his part, Trump said he wouldn’t have countenanced the second strike on the survivors. “[I] wouldn’t have wanted that,” he told reporters. The first strike, though, was “fine.”

And maybe it was. “Fine,” I mean. Maybe we want to blow up drug boats in the Caribbean as i) an intimidation tactic vis-à-vis the regime in Caracas, ii) a show of conviction vis-à-vis our determination to keep narcotics out of the US and iii) a vulgarly conspicuous exemplar of the Trump administration’s heavy-handed Latin America policy.

Or maybe we don’t want that. Maybe we think blowing up boats is overkill when we’re talking about cocaine. And maybe we doubt we’re accomplishing much when it comes to pressuring Nicolás Maduro by intercepting kilos of coke with Hellfire missiles instead of Coast Guard vessels. And maybe we believe Latin America’s already convinced enough of US military prowess without weekly shows of force.

But by making this especially sordid episode in Trump’s evolving Latin America policy turn on whether US service members are or aren’t committing war crimes — and thereby are or aren’t justified in refusing to carry out Hegseth’s orders, as half a dozen US lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds asserted last month to Trump’s deep chagrin — is to overcomplicate things.

This isn’t a war. Cocaine traffickers aren’t enemy combatants. They’re just drug smugglers. Either it’s ok to blow them up or it isn’t. Congress needs to come down on one side of that. Trying to hedge and say, “Well, maybe it’s ok to kill five of them, but if two survive the first strike we can’t kill them because that’s contrary to how we typically treat shipwrecked sailors,” is ridiculous. Do we want to legalize the extraterritorial execution of coke smugglers or don’t we? That’s the question.

Trump’s anti-coke spiel is entirely dubious (as exemplified by the fact that he just pardoned a convicted cocaine trafficker who, as the Times helpfully pointed out, “once boasted that he would ‘stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’ [and] accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo”), but most lawmakers in Washington would surely agree the US has an interest in curtailing the flow of cocaine into the country.

So, how to do it? Traditionally not like Hegseth’s doing it because it’s a Pandora’s box. If we’re going to blow up boats in the Caribbean, why not bomb the hills of Sinaloa? And labs in the Andes? Etc.

I’m not sure about the legislative logistics, and I doubt the political will’s there given the GOP’s subservience to Trump, but unless Congress wants to implicitly green light attacks across Latin America, lawmakers need to make it explicitly illegal for Trump and Hegseth to carry out unilateral military strikes in the name of combatting the narcotics trade. That’s not the Pentagon’s purview.

Postscript

We can’t completely separate the strikes from Hegseth’s open hostility to what he calls “politically correct and overbearing” rules of engagement. Relatedly, we can’t ignore the possibility that Hegseth’s using the Caribbean as a testing ground to acclimate America’s armed forces to a new reality where military personnel are expected to “do [Trump’s] bidding regardless of the law,” as Max Boot put it this week.