Philosophers have long since prepared us for the possibility of history repeating itself the first time as tragedy, the next farce. But they have seldom if ever spoken to the situation we now experience simultaneous tragedy and farce, the two seemingly inextricably intertwined. Likewise, while the idea of tragicomedy has been spoken of since the days of ancient Rome, it appears that up until now we've been able to do without recognizing a step beyond to tragifarce.
How else to think about, for instance, the case of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth? While he may be running neck and neck with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for best comedy performance by a U.S. Cabinet member in the twenty-first century (with apologies to RFK, Jr. partisans), this obviously does not mean that we can dismiss his activities as nothing more than the buffoonish episodes that they often are. Which is to say that we can neither ignore the tragic aspect of the rise to power of a man like that the lethal side of the tragifarce, as he himself might put it nor fail to consider how it is that he got there.
Individually, the former Fox and Friends talking head rose to prominence through his defense of members of the American military who were charged with killing prisoners and civilians, but as Matthieu Aikins emphasized in America's Vigilantes, his recent New York Times Magazinearticle on Trump administration foreign policy, Hegseth is also representative of a new attitude toward the military... emerging on the political right: for the troops, but against the generals.
The news media have certainly given substantial attention to what we might sardonically call the lighter side of Pete Hegseth e.g., his inclusion of his wife, brother, lawyer and the Editor in Chief of The Atlanticin highly confidential online group chats about then upcoming (illegal but not unprecedented) bombings of Yemen; berating a captive audience of military leaders about beardos, and fat generals, etc. So far as the more serious side of the Hegseth escapade goes, early coverage leaned toward his contributions to the administration's overall assault on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, wokeness, and other forms of political correctness an understandable enough focus, given the potential impact of his planned tear-downs upon substantial numbers of women and minorities in the military.
But ultimately its the changes he advocates for U.S. conduct of war that lie behind his appointment as Defense Secretary, a nomination so out-there as to require transporting Vice President JD Vance over to the Senate Chamber to cast the deciding vote to secure his confirmation (for only the second time in the history of U.S. cabinet appointments, the first having occurred in Trump's first term.) To put the principal Hegseth initiatives succinctly, we can say that he favors the military embracing greater lethality; and opposes any restraints placed upon that lethality by the Geneva conventions. This, regardless of the fact that the U.S. is a signatory to the 1949 international agreement on protection of civilians, wounded, and prisoners during the conduct of war, and is thereby committed to upholding it. While this new stance has also had some immediate direct effect on military personnel, thus far its mostly been a few judge advocate generals and others perceived as potential roadblocks to the planned new order. And given that this is a group generally not prone to making a great deal of noise if they are eighty-sixed, this aspect of the Trump/Hegseth military plan has at first been treated as less impactful.
The audience that Hegseth most directly plays to, on the other hand, is substantially larger. For a combination of reasons including the fact that the wars on terror as they were once known never involved a military draft; were primarily fought at such great distance from the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq; increasingly involved remote drone warfare; and droned on for over two decades it may come as a surprise to many that about 2 million Americans have been deployed to those wars since 2001. And indeed, apart from being perhaps over-represented in the ranks of congressional candidacies, this group of veterans has had a substantially lower public profile than their predecessors from the Vietnam War.
Among those 2 million, of course, were substantial numbers who were placed in harm's way in situations that often neither they nor their friends and family back home understood. And there was solid reason for this lack of understanding, in that neither the military leaders who commanded these troops, nor the political leaders who sent them, really understood the why and wherefore of those situations all that well themselves. As a result, when individuals like Army Captain Matthew Golsteyn or Navy Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher were charged with killing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively there were a lot of people questioning why they were taking the fall when military higher-ups weren't.
As we know, Donald Trump moved to scoop up this constituency with his pardons of both officers, angering many military leaders along the way with this interference in the process. Hegseth has been even more direct in his appeal, telling the military and naval commanders corralled to the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps Base on Sept. 30, We... don't fight with stupid rules of engagement, here offering something of a tragifarcical echo of the Mel Brooks line from the movie Blazing Saddles: We don't need no stinking badges. In their place Hegseth proposed, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.
Although he did not then specify which stupid rules he disdained, in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the American Military, he had posed the question, Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? He also answered his own question: "Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago."
Here again, it will not serve us well to simply roll our eyes and mutter about going backwards in history, without taking a penetrating look at where and why our government has sent our military in this millennium. And it is not to suggest any retreat on the principle that personal responsibility for actions taken in the course of warfare extends throughout the military top to bottom to also maintain that the responsibility doesnt stop there. Any decision to limit the discussion of American war crimes to whether its the grunts or the brass that bear primary responsibility assures that we will pass right by the point where that responsibility actually lies. We should also not allow the farcical aspects of Petes Great Defense Department Adventure to prevent opponents of our militarys current permanent-war standing from recognizing that there are some things that we may actually agree with him on.
If Hegseth wants to argue that American soldiers have been placed in situations they never should have been I think we agree. If he thinks that American soldiers were sent to fight wars they couldn't win I think we agree. And in the unlikely event that he were to go further and decide that American soldiers have been placed in wars that the U.S. should never have entered I also think we would agree there too.
Give Hegseth and his boss credit for truth-telling at least in their effort to rename the Defense Department the Department of War. As Hegseth told the silent military crowd in Quantico, We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We're training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend. Yes, for some time now, the U.S. Department of Defense has not primarily been true to its name. As a rule both sides to a war will uniformly insist that they are not the aggressors and are actually fighting in defense of something, and therefore justified, even though this clearly cannot be the case for both sides. They do so because much of the world does at least give lip service to the principle that wars that are not in fact fought in defense are illegitimate. So here we have the man now nominally in charge of pursuing U.S. military objectives acknowledging proclaiming really their illegitimacy. We might logically expect such a radical proclamation to be either hailed as revolutionary or denounced as revolting depending upon one's stance toward recent American foreign policy. The tragifarce of our age lies in the fact that for the most part neither has occurred. The jester-in-charge just revealed the truth! So what? He's a joke, isn't he?
In his above-mentioned book, Hegseth elaborated, "The key question of our generation--of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--is way more complicated: what do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva conventions? We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties. And no victory." He calls on the U.S. to ignore the 1949 agreements, writing "Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs." (And you know, by now, that I'm not making this up.)
Again, while it can be difficult to offer a serious response to such Hegseth-talk, we can acknowledge the individual horrors of soldiers dealing with ambushes, improvised explosive devices, and everything else that goes with being sent to invade a foreign nation, while still insisting upon considering the larger overall situation. For instance, if we were to consider how many American civilians were killed by Iraqi or Afghani bombs delivered either by plane or drone compared with how many civilians of those two nations were killed by American bombs, we might have a very different take as to who's guilty of barbarism exactly the take that the populations of those countries have. It might even be enough to provide a glimmer of understanding of how some of the more extreme among them might decide that, We will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.
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