By Terry Manning
I’m writing this well in advance of whatever resolution is reached in the scandal involving Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and what appears to have been a criminal bombing ordered against stranded boaters off the coast of Venezuela.
The attack was the latest in a series of efforts against boats the Trump administration accuses of transporting illegal drugs to the U.S. After the boat was initially hit and burst into flames, satellite video showed at least two survivors struggling amidst the flotsam. Someone in the chain of command then ordered a lethal finishing strike.
One might think the cosplay cowboy currently leading the Pentagon would know a couple of the basic good-guy rules: You don’t shoot a man in the back, you don’t shoot an unarmed man, and you don’t shoot a man who poses no threat to you.
I guess when you’re focusing too much on looking the part of Rent-a-Rambo the finer points of the role can get overlooked.
That’s definitely what I thought when I watched the broadcast in September when military leaders from around the globe were summoned to Quantico, Va., for a pep rally with Hegseth leading the way.
After insisting on more rigorous standards for fitness testing and facial hair, among other aesthetic points of emphasis, Hegseth announced the Department of Defense would revert to being called the Department of War, a name it abandoned at the end of World War II.
According to the official transcript on the Department of War website, Hegseth told the nation’s generals and admirals:
“We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”
I remember gasping when I heard that part of his speech. Like many Americans, I have several family members who are or have served in the military, and I recognized what Hegseth was saying was a betrayal of the oaths they took when they enlisted.
Here was a member of the president’s inner circle telling our armed men and women — and the world — we no longer considered ourselves bound by the rules of combat. Decency? Honor? Respect? Woke nonsense. Killing people whenever we felt like it? Damn straight!
Such a public display not only dishonored the people in attendance, it also potentially placed a target on the backs of our uniformed brothers and sisters around the world. If our enemies know going into a situation that American personnel are engaging them with no moral constraints, it all but guarantees an escalation of whatever force might precipitate an American response.
Putting troops in unnecessarily heightened danger is the exact opposite of what any military leader should do for the people serving under them.
Here we are now just a few months after the fact, and we’re seeing the first quantifiable results of that blustery ethos.
In just a few days, Hegseth and the president went from bragging about the strikes to blaming the media for making too much of them to saying they didn’t know what had happened and pointing fingers subordinates.
There’s their warrior ethic, laid bare: If there’s credit, move me to the front of the line. If there’s blame, they turn into high-profile dindus.
(If you’re not familiar with the term dindu, conservatives use it to refer to police suspects who claim innocence, as in, “I didn’t do it” or “I didn’t do anything.” Since everything has to be about race, they shorten it to “dindu” to mock what they perceive as Black dialect, e.g., “I dindu nuffin.” Because only Black people commit crimes, right?)
I’m sick about this whole thing, but I’m not surprised.
The current administration is loaded, from top to bottom, with people who are unqualified for the jobs they hold.
Their common trait is their allegiance to Trump for handing them plum positions to wield power over their enemies and cut deals to enrich their families for generations to come.
Not only are these people individually unqualified, they collectively are proving the adages about evil being its own worst enemy.
In his 1955 address “Discerning the Signs of History,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. makes the point clearly: “Evil carries the seed of its own destruction and that is just as true as the rising and the setting of the sun. If we understand the facts of nature, let us understand the facts of history.”
Evil cannot create or build, he wrote. It can only steal or tear down.
It doesn’t take much to extrapolate from that the inevitable fate of a nation that places and leaves evildoers in places of leadership.
Terry E. Manning worked for 20 years as a newspaper journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
