Addendum, day thirteen
As regular as the tides, the New York Times begins to distinguish itself, yet again, by slowly acquiescing to the coercive logic of the war, its irrepressible inevitability, its unhappy necessity. Everyone knows the outcome is now and will never be anything other than tragic but why don’t we try this and maybe things will turn out differently this time and if not better then perhaps, at least, we will have a more finely attuned sense of regret over the affair than the last time we did this and if it doesn’t work this time then never again. Never again.
The Times has run a piece this morning purporting to explain how Our Pete came to understand the law of war as immoral and unreasonable. Entitled “How Hegseth came to see moral purpose in war was weakness,” it is a fairly insipid piece of trash analysis which seeks to explain how the secretary went from being someone “driven by a moral calling” to someone who believes that “there should be no stupid rules of engagement” and that “death and destruction [should] rain from the sky”.
How, in other words, did Pete Hegseth become someone who believes that his personal moral attunement to the righteousness of his cause so far exceeds the objective right of law or custom as they bind the conduct of belligerents in war that he and his minions are able to wage war without conscience or equivocation, and with no regard for strategy or tactics, beginnings or ends?
It is not clear if the editors are upset about the war itself, or if their gripe is about the rhetoric around it, and the legal principles that shape it. Are they upset that the war is happening, or are they upset that they have been robbed of the usual ideological bromides by which they cultivate their naivete and preserve their innocence?
The editors would like you to know that Pete Hegseth is not a sadistic toddler whose appetite for destruction has been bent far out of proportion to the rage he feels at being in a world that does not immediately bend to his whim.
Pete Hegseth is motivated from a place of deep empathy, they tell us. He is a good person, if slightly broken. Perhaps, indeed, he is all the better for having been injured, for all the ways he endures, in spite of his scars.
Pete Hegseth once read an article about an “insurgent” who blew up eighteen Iraqi children and decided that, in that moment, he had peered upon the face of evil.
Apparently, it did not occur to Our Pete to ask who this insurgent was, or what he was doing, or why there was an insurgency in Iraq, or how it was–in the spring of 2005, when the White House was making its case for increasing the troop levels in and around Baghdad–this particular story happened to pass under his well manicured fingers.
Apparently, it did not occur to the Times to inquire into this version of the origin story.
Or to draw the far more damning conclusion that seems ready to hand:
Pete Hegseth is what happens when you put Timothy McVeigh in charge at the Pentagon.