Oh Look, We're In Another Vaporous War, Plus

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Oct 02, 2025

This cat had had better days (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Oh Look, We’re In Another Vaporous War

I’m taking a sick day but in a story related to my post yesterday mentioning the military’s historical responsiveness to illegal orders from this government and preceding ones, the Associated Press is reporting today that the regime has followed up the strikes on whoever the people were in those Venezuelan boats by declaring that we’re officially at war with “transnational drug cartels,” who have been designated as unlawful combatants.

President Donald Trump has declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and says the United States is now in a “non-international armed conflict,” according to a Trump administration memo obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday, following recent U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
Congress was notified about the designation by Pentagon officials on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The memo, startling in scope, signals a potential new moment not just in the Trump administration’s willingness to reach beyond the norms of presidential authority to wage war but in Trump’s stated “America First” agenda. It also raises stark questions about how far the White House intends to use its war powers and if Congress will exert its authority to approve — or ban — such military actions.

I can answer that last stark question about Congress exercising its authority: no, they won’t. They haven’t really even tried since giving carte blanche to the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. If nothing else, the current regime can hearken to the Obaman rationale for why the destruction of Libya wasn’t subject to congressional authority, which is that no US military personnel were at risk so it wasn’t actually a conflict.

If blowing up an entire country wasn’t subject to the War Powers Act, dropping rocks from a great height—the “kinetic strikes” referenced in stories on the attacks—onto little boats occupied by people who may or may not even be armed or drug traffickers but who definitely pose no threat to the US, surely isn’t either. Legislators were pissed off about Libya but ultimately there was nothing they could do, or at least nothing they were willing to do, and that was back when at least some of them on the GOP side took their responsibilities/prerogatives seriously, or did when a Democrat was president.

And please to remember that the regime fired the top lawyers at the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and replaced them with toadies, and installed Whisky Pete’s personal attorney who in private practice defends war criminals, and defenestrated about 600 JAG lawyers by reassigning them to the justice department as immigration judges. That’s a whole bunch of expertise on what’s legal and what isn’t out the window, replaced with expertise on doing what the regime wants.

So, yeah, let’s not get out over our skis on the expectation that congressional spleen or the institutional nobility of the military might serve as brakes on the regime’s lawlessness, especially given that the military already did some criming on their behalf with those initial strikes.

Just sayin’.