Are The War Crimes In The Room With Us Right Now?
To paraphrase Insane Clown Posse: "War crimes... how do they work?"
Everyone’s in a tizzy about war crimes. It’s understandable. I want to start this screed by stating my position on the record: I am against war crimes.
There are a few problems with the ongoing discussion about war crimes, Pete Hegseth, and Latino drug smugglers, though, and they render the entire discussion pointless. Let’s break this down into two parts.
First, the “crime”: A “double tap” strike of a boat. There’s been a lot of reporting on this issue, and it’s hard to tell what exactly happened. Let me say here that I agree with President Trump, who said he “wouldn’t have wanted a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine.”
I agree with Trump simply because I don’t really think it’s an economical use of our resources to blow up two wounded stragglers on a small boat with cocaine hundreds of miles from the United States. But that’s kind of beside the point.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m told by people smarter than me that it is technically a “war crime” to kill incapacitated combatants who no longer pose a threat, particularly in a naval context. Okay. But who is going to be prosecuted for this “crime”? Who is going to be thrown in jail? Nobody is.
War crimes are a lot like international law: they’re only real on paper if there’s nobody to enforce them. And I hate to break it to you, but tons of governments from the United States to Israel to Russia have conducted double tap strikes before, and their jail cells aren’t full of offenders. So the cable news pundits and newspaper writers lighting their hair on fire about whether or not Pete Hegseth committed a “war crime” are debating meaningless semantics in the current environment.
What they’re really distracting you from is the bigger part of this…