This is not that

Saying others did it first is not an excuse for immorality

This is not that. I like to say that when people begin to compare what terrorists do to what nations do in response to terror. The United States went to war for nearly two decades after 19 men crashed four commercial passenger jets, three of them hitting iconic buildings in New York and Washington, D.C., killing 2,976 Americans. Our military response directly killed about 940,000 people, of which about 432,000 were civilians. That’s a bit more than 315 dead per 9/11 victim, or 145 civilians per American civilian killed that day. At the time, I fully agreed with the War on Terror, because clearly we were unprepared for 9/11. In hindsight, I believe what we did was a mistake. But it doesn’t mean America acted in wanton bloodlust. Military response to a clear, vicious attack on civilians to create terror and harm our nation is not the same as terrorism. This is not that.

September 11 attacks in New York City: View of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. (Image: US National Park Service)

Another example, and I know from experience that when I wrote about Israel and terror, people tune out. I get it. If you like, skip ahead five paragraphs and I promise this isn’t the thrust of the article. But I have to say this. On October 7, 2023, hundreds of Gazan terrorists attacked Israel. They didn’t attack the IDF, though the IDF was one of the targets. But the IDF was only an incidental target, to neutralize nearby units who might respond, in order to get to the real target. Hamas wanted to kill and kidnap as many Jews, Israelis, and whoever happened to be with them, take them alive or dead as hostages, and harm them. They wanted to take or kill unarmed civilians, children, the elderly. They texted and shared photos on social media of their prizes and objectives.

Israel responded, methodically and with crushing force. There were about 1,200 murdered on 10/7, including more than 46 Americans, and 254 taken hostage, including a dozen Americans. After more than two years of war, over 70,000 Gazans have died¹, according to the Gazan health ministry. That’s just over 58 per 10/7 victim. Whatever else you might choose to believe about the IDF and Israel’s war objectives in Gaza, they have done a damn sight better than the U.S. after 9/11. You might say, “give it time,” as the U.S. fought for 17 years, versus two. But Israel is fighting a completely different war, literally on its borders.

What the IDF has done to dismantle Hamas’ tunnel network, locate and destroy its weapons caches, eliminate its leaders, and respond to attacks on its own soldiers (at least 913 IDF soldiers have given their lives), is not the same thing as what Hamas did on 10/7. All Hamas needed to do to gain a ceasefire was release the hostages. They could have done this at any time, and when they did decide to do it, a few times during the war, Israel gave them time and suspended attacks, until Hamas decided not to release more. It was only after Israel renewed its campaign against Gaza City and Hamas strongholds, and all of Hamas’ friends finally backed away, that all of the hostages returned.

The hostages were mistreated every day of their captivity. I have heard first person, in person, accounts of the physical and psychological torture they endured. They were starved, deprived of light, confined to tiny underground rooms with no sanitation. They were beaten, berated, abused, taunted, and sometimes, killed by their captors. Israel does have thousands of Palestinians, including Gazans, in prison, because these engaged in violence. You might say that Israel imprisoned and persecuted Palestinians and Arabs first, but this isn’t that. There are plenty of Arab Israeli citizens, even Palestinian Israeli citizens. The Arab nations that, 80 years ago, sent their own people to occupy Palestine so Jews would not be able to have a state of their own, did not repatriate the people they sent. They are perpetual refugees in a war their ethnic and original homes lost. And they call Jews the occupiers to this day.

Israel’s response to the worst terrorist act on its soil is not the same as the terrorist act. This is not that.

Now let’s get to narcoterrorism. It’s not a new thing. In fact, it dates back to 1839. China fought two wars against Great Britain and France, known as the Opium Wars. The British East India Company sold opium to the Chinese people, and access to ports and this highly profitable trade was guaranteed by the Royal Navy’s guns. When the Chinese emperor saw what opium addiction did to his people, he outlawed it. That made the East India Company angry, and Britain went to war to preserve its narcoterrorism operation. Winning that war yielded Hong Kong to the British, who kept it until 1997. As bad as communism is, and as terrible of a tyrannical, statist system the People’s Republic of China has, profiting from narcoterrorism at the level of empire is worse.

China is well aware of the costs of addiction. It is also locked into a global war of influence and power with the United States. A communist, statist, centrally-planned economy cannot compete, long-term, with a capitalist, pluralist society like America. So China’s strategy is to hobble our nation the way Great Britain hobbled China. They produced fentanyl, maintained friendly relations with western hemisphere nations who did not respect or like the Yanquis, and propped up narcoterrorist-friendly countries that sold drugs into the U.S.

The Biden administration did everything it could to pretend we didn’t have a massive border drug problem. The Obama administration before President Donald Trump did everything it could to “gunwalk” weapons into Mexico, a smuggling highway that continues to this day. Those presidents and administrations were dead wrong to do that, and they collectively allowed a drug problem to be a giant epidemic, a sore on this nation that has festered and murdered so many—I don’t know anyone who can’t name a friend or relative who has died, or committed suicide, due to drug addiction.

China is our adversary in just about every domain, in every economic forum, in every geopolitical theater. They have eclipsed Russia as the “big bad,” though Russia is still very bad on its own. So, what’s wrong with going after narcoterrorists in the Caribbean?

Nothing, except this isn’t that.

As Erick Erickson noted, “blowing up the boats of narcotics traffickers is not a legal act and redesigning them as “narcoterrorists” does not get around legal definitions that make the act a crime, not an act of war.” Congress has defined drug smuggling as a crime, which means it’s the domain of law enforcement. There is no AUMF passed by Congress allowing Trump to order Pete Hegseth to use lethal force against drug smugglers. Yet we do it, and those who have watched the video, in Congress, have come away with very different conclusions. If the initial strike on the drug boats is illegal, then the second strike is illegal, period, whether such a strike would be legal in a strictly military sense or not.

Where Erick’s conclusion is wrong is that he justifies the Trump administration’s actions in light of the Chinese threat and the previous administrations inaction and even allowing China and drugs to fester. This is the same argument people make when they are apologists for the 9/11 terrorists because the United States ended up killing a million people in response. It is the same argument that Israel has no right of self-defense or to disarm a serious threat to its national security on its very borders, because the Palestinians don’t get their own state (despite having one offered to them several times). It is this argument that somehow justifies lethal force against cocaine smugglers, while the president has the plenipotentiary power to pardon a cocaine kingpin in federal prison.

Between January 2021 through June 2024, 19,405 people died of cocaine overdose in the U.S. This does not include the number where other opioids was not involved. Just over 30,000 Americans died from methamphetamine overdose, not counting other opioids, in the same period, according to CDC data. When you add in other opioids as a factor, the numbers balloon to 92,697 and 96,614 respectively. The total overdose deaths is 309,274 in the same period, meaning just 6.2 percent of overdose deaths are from cocaine. Drug overdoses that include fentanyl as a factor are about 87.4 percent of the total. Clearly, cocaine-filled speedboats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean are not our primary problem.

The Chinese no longer ship fentanyl to Mexico for resale into the U.S. The Biden administration continued Trump 45 administration’s policy of pressuring the Chinese to stop commercial chemical manufacturing of fentanyl, and even its precursors. But illegal manufacturing continues and the Mexican cartels have gotten pretty good at making their own precursors (think: Breaking Bad). What the Trump administration is doing at the border is helping. Some of ICE’s activities is rounding up actual drug rings, and that’s helping too.

But in the vein of this is not that, ending all immigration from Afghanistan, after giving the Taliban complete control of that nation, because one sick individual shot two National Guard soldiers, is not a rational response. Acting with lethal force against cocaine smugglers while commercial-scale fentanyl production plants operate in Mexico and other Central American countries is not a rational response. It’s leading with lethality as a first resort, not a last resort.

I think the reason Trump hasn’t sent our military, in great force, into Mexico to conquer that country and end its narcoterrorism by defeating the cartels is simply because he can’t get away with it. There are lines the military, even the hand-picked MAGA-approved leadership post-purge, won’t cross. Taking four or five divisions of the U.S. Army into Mexico without a declaration of war or AUMF is one of those lines, and Trump has enough brain cells operating to know it.

So instead of Mexico, it’s Venezuela, which Trump is trying to goad into war with us, so he can send the army in, because he wants to make a deal with Maduro. Trump can order aircraft carriers to go anywhere on the high seas, and he can have Hegseth order individual small strikes against speedboats. Doing this doesn’t make it legal, or moral, or right. It brings the U.S. down to the level of our enemies. It puts us on the same moral footing as the narcoterrorists, or the British Empire in 1838. Even though we are not the ones selling drugs, we are knowingly fighting using drugs as a pretext.

The fact that previous administrations, and China, are primarily responsible for the growth of our drug problem doesn’t mean Trump can lead with lethality and acts of war. It is not war. Fight crime with law enforcement. Fight wars with the military. One thing is not the other, and can never be. We cannot justify our own use of lethal force as the first option by looking at what others have done before. If there’s no casus belli, then there’s no reason for a lethal response.

We cannot make two things that are not the same, as if they are the same. Cocaine smuggling is not wholesale manufacture and distribution of fentanyl. Violation of federal laws is not crashing jetliners into buildings. This is not that. If we are not accountable for our own behavior, eventually, the world will ensure that we pay a price. Giving no quarter, leading with lethality while offering mercy to those who do our bidding, will reap a bounty of no quarter for us, and the promotion of the very America-hating Americans we oppose on policy, but like Edward Snowden, giving them a haven and a platform.

We are better than this, or so I thought. We definitely can be better than this.

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1. The Gaza health ministry’s numbers have long been suspect, due to their refusal to categorize casualties and deaths by fighters and civilians, because they consider all their population to be victims. They also count anyone who died, for any reason, as a casualty of war. But in round numbers, their count is as accurate as anyone else’s. It’s merely manipulated for maximum propaganda value.