The Forgotten Casualties in Trump’s Wars
President Donald Trump views himself as a man of peace, so successful in settling wars that he should be the obvious winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. This after a year of promiscuous and foolish military interventions, splenetic and unpredictable tariff impositions, and bizarre and costly foreign demands, all presented as somehow making America great again.
Of course, the administration’s fervent, even fevered, justifications are almost always implausible, and usually untrue. Consider Trump’s splendid little war in Venezuela, supposedly undertaken to save, by the president’s accounting, literally hundreds of thousands of American lives. Yet Caracas doesn’t produce fentanyl, send drug-filled boats to the U.S., or make Washington’s Dirty Dozen drug list. And when Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was seized, Trump celebrated how he’d plundered the oil—which he apparently intends to sell under his administration’s sole control. Drug interdiction evidently concerned him little more than democracy promotion, which mattered not at all, even after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gave him her Nobel medal.
In trying to justify the military operation, Attorney General Pam Bondi explained that it was necessary to arrest a defendant—notably, a foreigner not subject to U.S. jurisdiction—“to face justice.” However, a failed judicial extradition is no justification for a military invasion. The Constitution does not authorize the president to attack another nation for that reason.
Moreover, war-making is always costly. In the case of Venezuela, scores of people apparently were killed. Not that anyone in Washington seemed to notice. Reported the New York Times:
The Defense Department said it was conducting an assessment of the damage resulting from the attack. “We are currently not aware of any civilian casualties,” the Defense Department said in an email. “Every strike was precisely planned to achieve operational objectives and at no point were civilians intentionally targeted.”
No doubt, the Venezuelan government, still in the hands of Chavista apparatchiks, may be inflating numbers for propaganda purposes. However, the U.S. military’s unbridled lethality is an important reason why its missions are typically so successful. And the lack of effective resistance suggests that there likely were significant casualties.
The Times confirmed at least two civilian deaths after U.S. strikes that included an apartment building. It reported:
At 2 a.m. last Saturday, inside his sky blue apartment building in Catia La Mar, a city on Venezuela’s northern coast, Wilfredo González said he was jolted awake by the sound of whistles and explosions. He had just managed to stand when the shock wave from a blast knocked him back to the ground. “They are bombing us,” he recalled. After it was over, his relatives rushed to find survivors amid the debris in his unit. Mr. González, 61, said he found his 80-year-old aunt, Rosa Elena González, pinned under a washing machine. “She was saying, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,’” Mr. González said, adding that she died shortly afterward at a hospital.
Moreover, scores of security personnel apparently died. According to the Times:
Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, said that 100 people had been killed, and at least as many wounded. The majority of those killed appear to have been members of the military. The Cuban government said 32 of those killed were Cuban citizens—members of the country’s armed forces or its interior ministry, on a mission in the country at Venezuela’s request. The Venezuelan government published obituaries for 23 service members who it said had been killed in the raid.
These were sons, brothers, and fathers. For instance, the Washington Post reported the story of 74-year-old Salvador Rodríguez, whose
son, the boy who’d always asked for Rodríguez’s blessings, who’d helped him through the anguish of his wife’s passing, had been taken from him, too—killed in an explosion during the mission by U.S. forces to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “I have his cédula right here,” he said, pulling out the seared identification card of José Salvador Rodríguez, 32, who had served as a member of the Venezuelan military. “It was burned by the explosion.”
Why did Washington kill the younger Rodriguez and many others like him? The U.S. and Venezuela are not at war. The administration has gone out of its way to claim that the expedition was a law enforcement operation not a military clash. In the latter, soldiers can be slaughtered largely at will, and civilians are also often killed en masse. However, observed Charli Carpenter of the University of Massachusetts: “For law enforcement operations, the bar is much higher.” Claiming to launch an international invasion to arrest a defendant brings to mind the much-reviled federal government assault on the David Koresh compound in Waco and the Philadelphia Police Department’s bombing of a civilian neighborhood in an operation against the black radical MOVE organization. (President George H.W. Bush’s justification for invading Panama was very different, with drugs receiving only a minor mention.)
Nevertheless, many U.S. policymakers undoubtedly dismiss such deaths as unimportant, or, in the case of Venezuelan and Cuban military and security personnel, even another benefit for America. Of course, there would be little, if any, reason to mourn the passing of regime elites, those responsible for ongoing, brutal repression. However, Washington had no cause to kill even them, let alone common service members tasked with protecting their nations and leaders. Especially to effect Trump’s oil grab.
Promiscuously killing foreigners for national advantage will also prove politically counterproductive. While “so’s your mother” isn’t a good justification by other governments engaging in foreign aggression, wanton genocide, war crimes, and sundry oppression, it is an effective dismissal of U.S. moralizing. If the Donroe Doctrine is that Washington can wage war to ostentatiously grab resources from neighbors and turn them into puppet states, then the president will have nothing to say if Russia and China, as well as lesser powers—say Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, or Iran in the Mideast—do the same in what they view as their spheres of interest.
Not that Trump is the only, or even the worst, American offender in this regard. President George W. Bush is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths resulting from his illegal and irresponsible invasion of Iraq. President Barack Obama underwrote a brutal, slow-motion regime change war in Libya, encouraging decades of intermittent conflict, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ murderous campaign against Yemen, which continues to burn. President Joe Biden armed and financed Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its ruthless West Bank occupation, policies that Trump continued.
Such casualties are also likely to undermine the administration’s Venezuela policy. Few Latin American analysts believe that Trump’s decapitation strategy will lead to stable governance or U.S. control, let alone a humane, liberal democracy. Already, reported the Times, Venezuela’s
government officials have accused the United States of killing innocent civilians, and they honored the servicemen who died as martyrs in the struggle against the “cowardly” U.S. attack. “The imperialists know they have committed a terrible crime, that they have murdered civilians,” Mr. Cabello said, adding that the United States has “generated an anti-American sentiment” for having “murdered a group of Venezuelans who had nothing to do with this.”
Notably, Cabello remains in power, actively undermining Trump’s agenda, despite also having been indicted for drug crimes in the U.S. So much for the administration’s claims about fighting drugs. Moreover, Cabello and other regime apparatchiks are busy attacking Trump’s policies. Added the Times:
On social media, the Venezuelan military released a deluge of cinematic videos from wakes and funerals. The footage showed wooden caskets draped in the tricolors of the national flag and blanketed in flowers, hoisted to the sounds of patriotic eulogies delivered by officers in full dress uniform. “The battle is not over, the homeland demands that we follow the example,” one officer declares in a video.
The world can be an ugly place, and Washington sometimes faces terrible choices. However, the U.S. president possesses neither the moral nor legal authority to wander the globe randomly imposing his will and killing anyone in the way. Someone claiming to be a peacemaker should stop irresponsibly visiting death and destruction upon other people. Even in Venezuela.
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