No more myths

The world would be safer without Pete Hegseth in a position of authority.  In the midst of allegations that he is guilty of murder, the Pentagon released a report by the Inspector General finding that Hegseth’s reckless behavior earlier this year endangered active military personnel during an attack on the Houthis in Yemen. Hegseth communicated classified information over Signal to a small group, including his wife, his brother, and a national journalist. The report noted that the information shared "created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots."

These airstrikes, essentially done at the behest of the Israeli government and the subsequent attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, are questionable uses of military force. 

Pressure is mounting to remove Hegseth. But in a curious way, Hegseth has helped strip away the myths that surround the US use of military force. Hegseth, like Trump, lacks the PR strategies of the electoral elite who cover military actions with high-sounding goals.  The political elite have consistently manipulated language to obscure their real motives in using US military power. 

Trump and Hegseth make it plain. Empires require killing. Inequality, power, and privilege are established through the use of deadly force. The myth that the US is a force for democracy is blown up with the bodies of desperate men clinging to life in the Caribbean.

Hegseth is the logical outcome of a nation that has never looked honestly at its past or considered what it means to create international relationships rooted in justice. We have used our military to secure cheap access to the resources of the globe, damning much of the world to poverty so we can consume what we want, when we want it.  Our greed for things has far outstripped our capacity to care for people and the planet. 

This new century has been filled with lawless state violence, much of it initiated by the U.S.A. It began with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. Rather than ask why these attacks happened, the Bush administration, along with the democrats and many progressives, initiated a War on Terror. Rather than naming the attacks for what they were, criminal acts by a small group, the corporate power elite seized the shock and anguish of that moment to expand the US military control of the oil-rich Middle East.  In the name of a War on Terror, we attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and Lebanon. We aided the Israeli government in the genocide against the Palestinian people. We killed heads of state, displaying their deaths for public view. We kidnapped people from the streets of other countries, transported them to “black sites” in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.. We subjected people to torture.  We murdered people. We developed legal justifications for inhuman treatments, masking their cruelty with the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, physical stress, solitary confinement, often in small coffin-like boxes, and direct assaults.  Acts of degradation and humiliation became routine. We are responsible for the deaths of nearly a million people, almost half of them children.

Now we are claiming a “war” on drugs. Such a framing obscures the real motives behind a push for regime change that started long before Hegseth and Trump and was supported by republicans and democrats alike.

Hegseth is not the first Secretary of Defense to make war on innocent people or to commit war crimes, violate the law, and relish killing. He makes the cost of continuing down the road of empire clear. None of us can pretend that the use of the military against Venezuela is anything other than a naked power grab fir control of almost 20% of oil on earth. 

We cannot evade the questions of who we have been or who we are becoming. We cannot hide behind myths. The choices in front of us are clear.  They go far beyond limiting the power of a few cruel and reckless men. They involve our willingness to create new ways of living with each other and the community of nations.