If they are not human, we do not have to follow the law

“Kill everybody” was what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly instructed the Special Operations commander as alleged drug smugglers were being tracked off the Trinidad coast.

A missile strike set their boat ablaze. Two survivors were seen clinging to what was left of their vessel. A second U.S. strike finished them off. These extra-judicial killings on Sept. 2 were the first in the Trump administration’s campaign to incinerate “narco-terrorists.” Over the past two months, at least 80 people have been killed in more than 20 attacks on the demonstrably false grounds that the Venezuelan government is a major source of drugs flowing into the United States.

Because the supposed drug runners are participating in an “armed conflict” against the U.S., they are not entitled to due process or other protections — such as those afforded to shipwrecked individuals — under the laws of war, the administration contends. “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth charged on X.

Language serves more than a strictly legal justification. The term “narco-terrorist” is meant to dehumanize and desensitize. Their conduct — murder, terrorism, and poisoning Americans’ bodies — morally disqualifies them and, therefore, justifies extraordinary punishment. The possibility that harmless fishermen are blown to pieces must not weaken our leaders’ resolve to defend the nation.

The boat strikes may be illegal and appalling, but the Trump administration’s conduct follows a long historical pattern, where America’s enemies operate outside the acceptable boundaries of civilization, and Washington's heavy-handed response can be justified by notions of national security, economic interests, racial superiority, or basic human decency — or all four simultaneously.

In his stimulating book, “Chasing Bandits: America’s Long War on Terror,” Nichols College historian Michael E. Neagle reveals the constancy of terms “connoting criminality, incivility, and illegitimacy of both causes and means,” such as bandits, savages, guerrillas, and terrorists. “I maintain that these pejorative descriptions have had two distinct utilities: one, to rally popular and political support in the United States by intimating cultural distinctions that suggested or reinforced a sense of American superiority, and two, to justify incursions abroad that provided the United States with more influence in places of strategic interest,” Neagle says.

The author’s framework compels us to question the necessity and costs of the Global War on Terrorism through an unfamiliar lens. Most readers probably have not considered comparisons between the hunt for Osama bin Laden (and “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq) and mostly forgotten manhunts and guerrilla fighting a century or more ago. In the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico during the First World War, and Nicaragua in the 1920s and ‘30s, U.S. invaders fought difficult campaigns against foes who were dismissed as savages or bandits motivated by greed or bloodlust rather than legitimate political aims, such as national independence.

For instance, the Filipino insurgency (1899-1902) under Emilio Aguinaldo used “sneak attacks, booby traps, and assassinations,” notes Neagle, tactics that “justified brutal acts of retaliation and intimidation otherwise considered uncivilized or unethical… soldiers often bent or broke recently established rules of engagement, creating a framework that would be used in future combat.”

Long before the George W. Bush administration authorized torture and the indefinite detention of “unlawful enemy combatants,” U.S. forces in the Philippines subjected insurrectos to the “water cure” and tossed thousands of Filipinos into concentration camps.

Aguinaldo, his insurgency crushed, eventually took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Neither Pancho Villa nor Augusto Cesar Sandino was ever caught by their U.S. pursuers. In these cases, Neagle argues, Washington still achieved its larger aims of ending the threat at the U.S.-Mexico border and quelling Sandino’s rebellion against American occupation in Nicaragua.

But the victories came at a lasting cost. Thousands died in scores of small battles stretched out over years. Villa may have intended to provoke a large reprisal when his private militia raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 Americans and sparking nationwide outrage. Both U.S. interventions fomented anti-American sentiment while turning Villa and Sandino into heroes, although the latter was more popular elsewhere in Latin America than within his own country.

“The paradoxical results of these missions,” Neagle concludes, “show the broader importance of recognizing limitations of military power.” Time and again, delegitimizing language blinded U.S. officials to the potential costs of war. The enemy’s behavior may have been beyond the pale, but trying to kill them produced a new set of unintended consequences. Or, as Neagle puts it, “One of the tragic ironies of the GWOT is that the longer the conflict continued, the more extremism multiplied.”

Ernesto “Che” Guevara makes an ironic appearance in “Chasing Bandits.” Ridiculed by U.S. critics as a “professional revolutionary” who lacked conviction but was nonetheless bent on exporting Marxism to the Third World, Guevara was susceptible to the same kind of magical thinking he derided among his imperialist adversaries. His missions in the Congo and Bolivia were disastrous. He and his ragtag fighters lacked popular support in both locales, thus ignoring his own “how-to” book for successful guerrilla warfare. Moreover, Guevara imagined a sort of domino theory where his heroics would “inspire similar rebellions in neighboring countries, including his homeland of Argentina, which was Guevara’s grandest dream,” Neagle says. The Bolivian military, supported by U.S. training and intelligence, caught and executed him, and then put his body on display.

His crusade failed, “but in death, Guevara’s reputation flourished… his devotion set a template for other like-minded revolutionaries in Latin America.”

A trenchant question that connects Michael Neagle’s disparate examples is whether capturing or killing an enemy leader makes any meaningful difference. The notorious narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar, who made billions on America’s cocaine addiction, was gunned down by Colombian authorities in 1993. Yet other cartels filled the void, and today Colombia still produces “about 90 percent of the cocaine powder reaching the United States,” according to the DEA.

In the white-hot rage following the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks a quarter-century ago, few Americans, from policy-makers to ordinary citizens, could foresee that the coming wars would exact staggering costs in blood, treasure, and national prestige. For many, all that mattered was that Osama bin Laden was an evil mass murderer who hated freedom. “We’ll smoke him out of his cave,” President Bush promised.

By the time bin Laden was tracked down in Pakistan a decade later, U.S. public opinion had soured on the global war on terrorism. Did killing al-Qaeda’s founder matter by then? And what of the millions of lives upended as “forever war” and refugees rippled across the Greater Middle East? Michael Neagle’s important book encourages us to confront these questions anew. As has long been obvious but too often ignored, Washington cannot escape the law of unintended consequences, no matter how evil — or savage, backward, criminal, or inhuman — its enemies.