The use of excessive force will have long term consequences
And a hauntingly beautiful rejoinder to the vile speeches at Quantico from Robert Arnold, Poet of the South
Ulysses S. Grant 1822-1885. Getty Images
Last weekend, off the Venezuelan coast, Trump ordered another summary execution of people on a fishing boat whom he claims were drug traffickers. Since then, despite the international outcry, Trump officials have provided no intel, no intercepted communications, no photos— no evidence whatsoever— that drugs were even onboard when the strike command was given.
It was the 4th such strike by the US in as many weeks. The ship exploded on contact, killing everyone onboard. A total of 21 people have now died on the high seas on Trump’s orders, based on suspicion of drug trafficking.
Trump defends the strikes as countering “narco-terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, which Trump has unilaterally designated a foreign terrorist organization. But equipment analysis rebuts his claim: the small fishing boats could not have reached the US mainland due to distance and fuel limitations of the vessels’ small size.
Whether the dead were engaged in drug trafficking or not, law-abiding nations do not kill like this. The United Nations condemned the strikes because “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers. Under international law, suspected drug traffickers should be disrupted, investigated and prosecuted in accordance with the rule of law, including through international cooperation.” Extrajudicial killings are also illegal under the US Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Trump authorizes the domestic use of similarly excessive force
Instead of careful introspection in the wake of what appears to be murder on the high seas, Trump’s Secretary of “War” published snuff videos bragging about the violence, offering up raw meat for MAGA fans watching Fox News.
During his recent speech to military brass gathered in Quantico, Virginia, Hegseth made his yearning for unrestrained “lethality” known, as he and Trump push for escalating barbarism both abroad and at home.
After an outrageous attack on a 5 story residential building in Chicago, where ICE used flash bangs, helicopters and drones to invade apartments while people were sleeping, Trump is champing at the bit to do the same and worse in Portland, Oregon. Trump promised this week to send troops to attack “domestic terrorists” in Portland, authorizing the use of “Full Force, if necessary.” Trump justified the command by claiming it is necessary to protect ICE facilities, which he falsely described as “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.”
Trump employs rotating justifications for the violence, from reducing immigration to fighting crime to “protecting federal assets.” That people are dying from his authorization of excessive force has not dampened his appetite.
Brutality without restraint will destroy America and the ideals she stands for
Robert Arnold, “the Poet of the South,” has recorded a hauntingly beautiful rejoinder to the Trump administration’s lust for violence. After Arnold witnessed Trump and Hegseth’s shameful speeches at Quantico, where Hegseth called for lessening the rules of conflict in favor of muscular lethality, he wrote “On the silence of the generals.”
Arnold’s talk is a seven minute review of why military restraint makes nations strong, and how discipline rather than unbridled “lethality” advances humanity. Every classroom in the nation should watch it. Arnold observes correctly that lethality without restraint is not strategy; it is butchery. As if responding to Trump’s snuff videos, Arnold notes that even during the Civil War, “General Grant, bloody and relentless, knew victory meant binding the wounds of the nation— not gloating in violence.”
Arnold rejects Hegseth’s call for weakening the rules of conflict, and memorialized the silence of the generals in the room at Quantico. As they listened to Hegseth and Trump debase the seriousness of combat,
“Our Generals understand war is the most consequential of human actions- their decisions carry lives in the balance. They know that raw violence is a tool only to be used with precision, justification, and the dignity of restraint. They know war has consequences that echo for generations.
Hegseth does not know this.
Hegseth mistakes slogans for wisdom, violence for professionalism, brute force for strategy. He preaches lethality like a child who’s never had to carry the ghosts from a battlefield home with him. He sees the military as a weapon to be swung, not a burden to be borne.”
Americans should heed Arnold’s warning
Arnold’s words are haunting because they are true. The US military is the most lethal force on earth, “not because it is the most violent, but because it has chosen discipline over chaos, professionalism over cruelty.”
Arnold warns that the world will backslide into barbarism if Trump has his way. He stresses America’s historic pride “in knowing that we do not wage war like a 3rd rate regime.” If we abandon the rules of war under the Geneva Convention and “reduce ourselves to brutality and call it strength, then the world will follow us into the pit. Other nations will cast off restraint, and humanity will slide backwards into darkness.”
Trump and Hegseth must intuit that murdering people at sea will create permanent enemies in the form of radicalized South Americans who, with justification, hate us. Arnold points this out: “Every officer in the room at Quantico has seen insurgencies grow of careless violence. (They’ve seen) reports that turned into viral recruitment videos for radicals. (They’ve) knelt next to cots where names were written on slips of paper and learned that nothing erases a family’s grief except truth and restraint and accountability.”
The silence of the generals at Quantico reflected the calculus of consequence: “For every enemy struck without care, there are 10 who will rise in hatred, and 50 children who will remember the smoke. To adopt third world cruelty is not to become stronger. It is to become smaller than what we claim to be.”
The generals who sat quietly at Quantico did not need to say this out loud, their silence said it for them.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
Trump is simple, he has only one method: testing the limits, again and again and again. Our silence = acquiescence. Our objections raise his attention. Our howls send him back to his doghouse for protection. He will pursue this method until he’s in his grave. Only question: do we let him?
thank you for a great article. but just one suggestion about emphasis: it wasn't so much an attack on a 5 storey Chicago BUILDING as an attack on every PERSON in it.