Criticizing America for War Crimes is Like Criticizing Fire for Burning
The etiquette of atrocity: disciplining how we talk about the violence America is built upon
The recent scandal over the “double-tap” operation in the Caribbean — in plain words, the execution of a few men on a speedboat who survived an initial U.S. Navy strike, only to be finished off as they clung to the wreckage — has been meticulously confined to a debate about whether Pete Hegseth is a “war criminal” for authorizing the follow-up strike. This comes as members of Congress, many of them graduates of the U.S. war machine or so-called “intelligence community,” have rushed out videos solemnly urging soldiers to disobey unlawful orders, prompting Trumpian rage in response. Cable news panels and op-eds have been thick with familiar clichés: “This is not who we are.” “We’re better than this!” “If we do this, what message does it send when other countries do bad things?” The entire spectacle treats the act as a shocking departure from American norms — rather than a perfectly ordinary expression of them.
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The ensuing political and media discourse around the operation silently accepts the premise of empire — the United States can and will impose its will where, when, and how its rulers desire — while feigning disapproval at its methods. The point is not to interrogate the flimsy pretext for attacking Venezuela at all, but to fortify the myths that allow an imperial order to survive every new atrocity.
Manufacturing Impunity
Beyond the outrage theater around the “double-tap” sit three simple truths upon which U.S. imperial narratives are constructed:
The Myth of Aberration: The mainstream reaction manufactures the absurd notion that there is something singular, aberrant, even unimaginable about the United States committing war crimes in plain sight. The U.S. has just spent years openly funding and arming a genocide in Gaza, on top of two decades of near-daily war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: weddings obliterated, neighborhoods incinerated, torture sites franchised across continents. The only new element here is that the victims happened to be a bit closer to Florida.
Not Why, but How: The “but was it a war crime?” framing quietly shifts the terrain from “Military action against Venezuela is wrong” to “If we’re going to do military action, we must follow the rules.” The question is not why a U.S. warship is hunting unknown targets in the Caribbean at all, but whether the second missile complied with the Law of Armed Conflict; the premise of unprovoked aggression is quietly accepted, and the debate reduced to process complaints. This reflects an ultimate triumph of ruling-class ideology: a population that has fully internalized the idea that the only legitimate critique of war is that it’s being carried out sloppily. Within this triumph, the “rational-legal” authority of the rules becomes a shield for the underlying irrationality and illegitimacy of perpetual war.
The Rotating Villain Trope: The narrative is carefully personalized and partisan. Hegseth becomes the cartoon villain, Trump the dark puppet-master, and the implied lesson is that this sort of thing happens because “we’ve strayed” from the good, rules-based, grown-up presidents. This is historical farce. The “double-tap” — hitting survivors and first responders — was refined into an art form under Barack Obama (the “drone king” himself), a tactical refinement within a continuous project. The violence is not owned by one faction of the ruling class, but is a tool of the class itself in managing its global interests. Incinerating civilians, in or out of a declared war, is not a Trump innovation; it is an American tradition that predates and will outlive any individual administrator.
None of this discursive fog would be possible without a population meticulously trained not to see. The United States has spent decades destroying public education, turning higher education into a debt-peonage racket, and handing media over to a handful of billionaires. You do not get a country that can watch live-streamed atrocities in Gaza and still say “this is not who we are” by accident; you get it through a massive investment in constructing a compliant populace deliberately alienated from historical and geopolitical understanding.
The Dialectic of Distraction
A defining tactic of empire is perpetual motion — to keep the target and the terms of debate constantly shifting. One moment, the obscenity of threatening Venezuela is briefly visible. The next, the entire conversation has been narrowed to whether Pete Hegseth technically committed a war crime — as if any administration in living memory did not have blood up to its elbows. The structure is a dialectic of distraction:
Thesis: A brutal act of imperial violence.
Antithesis: A managed controversy over its form.
Synthesis: The reaffirmation of the state’s right to wield violence, just more “professionally.”
Criticizing America for war crimes really is like criticizing fire for burning: war crimes are not a glitch in the system, they are how the system works. The U.S. empire rests on sanctions that starve, bombs that erase, blockades that suffocate, coups that overthrow democracies, and military bases that ring the globe. To ask it to project power without committing atrocities is to ask a flame to emit light without heat. To demand a humane imperialism is a contradiction in terms.
The task for all people of principle is to reject the narrative entirely, and to reset it: The problem is not an “unlawful order,” but the lawful existence of an imperial machine whose purpose is domination. The problem is not that a strike went “too far,” but that the strike was a logical expression of a system rooted in expansion, exploitation, and domination.
We do not need anguished debates about whether this or that atrocity crosses a red line. We need to withdraw our consent from the entire project: from the sanctions regimes and proxy wars to the bipartisan consensus that the planet is a chessboard for U.S. power. The only moral position is to oppose the wars of empire, categorically.
Everything else is just arguing about the proper etiquette for murder.
This piece succinctly describes all the swirl of thoughts and feelings I’ve had while discussing the recent military escalation in the Caribbean with my liberal family members, and in a far more organized manner than I am often capable. Thank you for the great resource that I can only hope they’ll read and engage with critically when I send it to them. I hope that your page finds an audience, because it’s well deserved.
Absolutely right! No more war or offensive actions of conflict!