Do Not Help Trump Hide The Hardships Of His Illegal War
Inside the mailbag: AOC ... 25th Amendment ... Epstein Files
Dear readers,
I wanted to quickly note that, in the days since our coverage of Jared Polis, every member of the Colorado legislature wrote to him telling him not to pardon the insurrectionist Tina Peters. And he responded by kicking the can way down the road past her appeal. A bit of good news we helped make happen together.
Phil Schumacher: You and others have written a lot about the need for accountability if/when Democrats take the White House and there is a Democratic Attorney General. Much of this has focused on Executive branch political officials - Noem, Miller, etc. My question is about high ranking military officers. Both the Iran War and the extrajudicial killing of at least 150 people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been carried out by high-ranking military officers. It seems to me that if they are not held accountable (court martial?) then the military will always be there as a loaded gun to carry out the illegal orders of another President. How necessary is it that high ranking military officers be charged for carrying out illegal orders and is there any chance a Democratic President would even consider this option and if they don’t what it means for the Republic?
One problem here is that laws governing the use of military force contain ambiguity. It may not be possible to write them in a way that removes ambiguity. And I suspect the boat strikes and Iran war will fall in different realms.
To wit, I suspect we’ll find unambiguous criminal activity vis a vis the boat strikes, and any complicit officers should obviously face justice along with the political leaders who issued the orders, wrote the legal pretexts and so on. That’s necessary for the abstract cause of justice, and for the incentive-setting reasons you mentioned.
But the Iran war isn’t quite as straightforward a case of a small number of officers obeying clearly illegal orders. The war itself is surely illegal from the perspective of civilians looking in. But from the perspective of flag or general officers?
“The civilian leadership ordered me to fire on a fishing boat nowhere near any war zone and leave no survivors” is not the same thing as, “the civilian leadership told us military action against an enemy was of immediate necessity for the national defense.”
Obviously the power to declare war resides with the Congress. But acts of war can be undertaken legally and unilaterally by the president under certain conditions1.
We know (because we have the luxury of being subjective) that those conditions haven’t been met, that Trump is a fool and a liar and can’t settle on a single pretext for launching this war. And I suspect many of the officers who obeyed these orders know it at some level, too. But it’s still grey. They aren’t really trained to make unilateral judgments about whether the president is stretching the concept of “imminent threat” beyond its breaking point. The actual lawyers and political appointees are supposed to do that. And I’m all for doing to Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and her subordinates at DOJ what should have been done, e.g., to John Yoo.
But you probably create perverse incentives if you pin this all on the generals, rather than the actual architects of the war. To be clear, the basis for this war is so clearly fictitious that it’d be reasonable for officers and service members to refuse, resign, retire, testify publicly, whatever. I’d like to think that’s the course I’d take if I’d gone a different direction in life. But the existence of a pretextual, bad-faith legal case for this war should shift the burden of accountability back to the political leadership. It’s different in kind, I think, from Pete Hegseth pointing to boats at random and firing officers until he finds one who’ll murder everyone on board.
Dan Parnas: The Republicans are so good at politicizing the deaths or violence committed by illegal immigrants against US citizens to the point of naming a bill after one of the victims, Laken Riley that some Democrats even voted for. Wouldn’t the Democrats be served well by doing something similar to point out the hypocrisy and corruption of the Trump administration by using examples of January 6th rioters that were pardoned and then went on to commit terrible crimes like Andrew Paul Johnson who was recently sentenced to life in prison for multiple sexual abuse charges against children? I don’t see any way that the Republicans could defend themselves against that one. We should all know the name of Andrew Paul Johnson in the same way we speak of Charles Manson or John Wayne Gacy.
You’re speaking my language. Indeed, I wrote about the identical issue earlier this year.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know without Googling what “Willie Horton” means, in a political context. You’ve probably heard of Laken Riley. I could make a long list like this—villains and victims Republicans use to smear Democrats and scare the public into voting GOP. When facts on the ground aren’t conducive to scapegoating any one individual, they revert to collective guilt for real and imagined crimes. Haitians, Somalians, the nebulous “they” who supposedly killed Charlie Kirk and tried to kill Donald Trump.
Now here’s a test question:
How many pardoned January 6 insurrectionists have recidivated or been nabbed for earlier crimes? How many of their names do you know?
The Republican tactic is obviously effective. But Dems are hobbled by two things: a reluctance to engage in icky politics, and consultants with ridiculous ideas about how mass persuasion works, how parties are branded, etc.
The good news is, Democratic officials are (I think) increasingly aware of the shortcomings of this machinery they’ve built for themselves over decades.
The bad news is they also seem daunted by it. There’s no alternate ecosystem of consultants that can be swapped in for the ones telling Democrats not to make issue of their opponents’ moral turpitude. The ones who say that Donald Trump being a credibly accused pedophile, who pardoned fellow pedophiles, is of little political value.
What to do about all this? A few thoughts.