Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
The “fog of war.”
That is how Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary, describes his Sept. 2 war crime in the Caribbean. It was just the “fog of war.”
As reported by the Washington Post, Hegseth ordered U.S. military personnel to “kill everybody” on board a small boat off the coast of Trinidad. They launched an initial missile “striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern,” the Post reported, and leaving “two survivors “clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
Commanders “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions,” and the “two men were blown apart in the water.”
Both Hegseth and President Donald Trump have acknowledged the order, but as the Post in a follow-up report writes, they have “deflected responsibility for the killing” and are blaming senior military officers.
Congress, as of this writing, is considering an investigation, but the focus on Hegseth’s — and Trump’s — apparent war crime is only part of a larger story in which Trump and the sycophants he calls a cabinet have been hellbent on going to war with Venezuela.
The September operation was the first of 23 strikes against Venezuelan boats by American fighter jets and drones that have killed at least 83 people so far, amid a massive military buildup in the Caribbean. Trump has publicly mused about a potential ground invasion of the South American nation, has accused its president, Nicolas Maduro, of leading a drug cartel, and reportedly issued “an ultimatum” to Maduro, demanding that he “relinquish power immediately.”
Maduro has been in the U.S. crosshairs for much of his tenure in office. He has spent 12 years dismantling democratic institutions and governing as an autocrat, rigging elections and imposing a police state in Venezuela. U.S. presidents of both parties — along with dozens of other nations — refused recognition of his presidency, and he was indicted under the first Trump administration.
The issues at hand are whether the United States can impose regime change on Venezuela, and whether the Trump’s rationale — charges that Maduro is involved in the international drug trade, especially in the transport of Fentanyl to the United States, and whether that constitutes terrorism — are anything more than a pretext designed to skirt constitutional protections against executive overreach.
Let’s start with the drug and terrorism questions. The “cartel” in question — Cartel de los Soles — is, as Charlie Savage reports, “not a literal organization, according to a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues, from think-tank analysts to former Drug Enforcement Administration officials.”
It is instead a figure of speech in Venezuela, dating back to the 1990s, for Venezuelan military officials corrupted by drug money, they say. The term, which means “Cartel of the Suns,” is a mocking invocation of the suns Venezuelan generals wear to denote their rank, like American ones wear stars.
It is for that reason that the D.E.A.’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment, which describes major trafficking organizations in detail, has never mentioned Cartel de los Soles. Nor has the annual “World Drug Report” by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
If Cartel de los Soles is not a functioning organization, as most experts on the region argue, then both the cartel and terror charges lack substance. There is evidence that the Venezuelan military — before and during Maduro’s reign — have been involved with the drug trade, and is unclear how removing Maduro by force would address that.
It is unclear, as well, why Trump and his minions view Venezuela’s apparent middle-man status as more dangerous than the actions of Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, who “was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison” because he oversaw a massive operation that flooded U.S. streets with cocaine. Trump has announced that he plans to pardon Hernandez, releasing him from prison, raising questions about his entire anti-drug rationale — and his argument for regime change, which was on shaky moral grounds to begin with.
Trump’s argument that Venezuela poses a direct threat to American security does not hold water, and amount to executive overreach. Trump’s air assaults on small boats in international waters, his military buildup and the threat to send in ground troops amount to an undeclared war on a sovereign nation, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and just-war doctrines. Congress needs to step in and make it clear that there will be consequences for Trump. Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio if they continue beating these war drums.
Hank Kalet is a writer from New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; X @newspoet41; Instagram @kaletwrites; See hankkalet.substack.com.
