The debate should be about whether the ‘war on drugs’ is literal or not.
The debate should be about whether the ‘war on drugs’ is literal or not.
W ashington has been consumed with a debate about the so-called double tap attack on a Venezuelan drug boat on September 2, but the issue should really be the first tap.
If drug boats are a military threat, and if drug runners are enemy combatants, then eliminating them entirely in an attack isn’t necessarily an outrage.
It’s a brutal fact of warfare that enemy fighters who are rendered defenseless are cut down in the course of combat.
When, for instance, taking out a Japanese machine gun emplacement in World War II, G.I.s didn’t do a health and welfare check before finishing the job — if Japanese fighters couldn’t defend themselves, that was a feature, not a bug.
Likewise, we didn’t hesitate to sink the Yamato at the thought that some wounded Japanese sailors aboard were going to be killed in the massive magazine explosion that took her down.
Now, if enemy fighters surrender or a ship strikes its colors, that’s another matter.
This gets to the crux of the matter, though: There were no colors to strike, because the drug boat on September 2 wasn’t a military vessel, and presumably it didn’t occur to the people on board to surrender when they had no idea they were supposed to be members of a foreign fighting force.
So it’s true that the boat and the survivors were as much a military threat after the first strike as they were before it — because the threat never existed in the first place.
According to a new ABC News report, the survivors of the first strike “were believed to be potentially in communication with others, and salvaging some of the drugs. Because of that, it was determined they were still in the fight and valid targets.”
By no reasonable standard is a drug runner engaged in an act of war if he’s trying to figure out how to salvage some cocaine after his boat blows up.
What has happened is that the administration has decided that if it can apply a label to something — “threat,” “war,” “terrorist” — the reality doesn’t matter.
It’s true that illegal drugs are a threat to the United States, but not a military threat.
It’s also correct to say we’ve long been waging a “war on drugs,” although a metaphorical one on par with the war on poverty or the war on cancer. Finally, it might be that drug runners are terrorists in some vague, very broad sense that they are bad people doing bad things, not in the sense that they are conspiring to carry out attacks in the United States.
But, to borrow the phrase about Trump from the 2016 campaign, the administration has chosen to take all these terms not just seriously, but literally.
Thus a fast boat with some cocaine on it becomes the functional equivalent of a vessel in the Japanese fleet steaming toward Pearl Harbor.
Cocaine is bad, and cocaine-trafficking is bad. In an ideal world, no one would take the drug. But we should acknowledge that the only reason that fast boats laden with cocaine are headed toward the United States is that so many people here in our own country find pleasure in taking it and actively seek it out.
This is another distinction between running drugs and waging war. There is a market for the former, whereas there is none for the latter. No one ever said, “What I’d really like to happen at the nightclub tonight is for the establishment to get destroyed by enemy artillery shells,” whereas many people think, “I hope I can score some cocaine at the club tonight.”
We also aren’t consistent in fighting this purported war. Every conflict involves choices about what strategies and tactics to use, but it’s never the case that one aspect of a war — like the drug boats in the Caribbean — is addressed with kinetic operations while the rest is treated like a routine criminal matter.
This would be a little like the Allies saying in the early stages of World War II that, on the one hand, they will fight the Germans coming through the Ardennes, and, on the other, only seek to arrest and confiscate the parachutes of Germans landing on Crete.
If the cocaine trade is truly a hostile act, we’d be justified in carrying out bombing raids against all the farmers cultivating cocoa leaf across Latin America, and local drug dealers selling the trafficked cocaine in the United States would be charged with sedition or confined in POW camps.
That no one is seriously contemplating such ideas is a sign that we aren’t truly in a war with drug trafficking — we just want to ding the drug boats, as a show of force and a way to scare traffickers and Nicolás Maduro.
We haven’t even been imprisoning the survivors of subsequent drug-boat strikes in POW camps, to be held until the end of the conflict; we’ve been repatriating them, which would be an insane decision if this was a real war.
Again, to harken back to World War II, we held captured German combatants in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, rather than sending them back to Nazi Germany after we, say, disabled their vehicles.
In short, whether it’s one tap or two, this is a dubious operation, and it doesn’t make sense to get overly exercised and legalistic about the follow-on strike on September 2 without asking deeper questions about the entire mission.