This is what they're mad about?
Groupchat bombing and the imperatives of empire
IT TOOK A FEW months, but the clammy corpse of the Democratic Party is animate again. Or perhaps it’s like when you dribble soy sauce on a dead squid. The muscles twitch and give the illusion of being alive. What’s jolted them from their senescence? Not the masked snatch-teams disappearing dissidents from American streets. That barely musters a raised eyebrow. No, not the tariff chaos or the Trump regime’s daily wreckage of judicial procedure. They won’t get out of bed for anything less than a constitutional crisis. If there is a single issue on which Democrats are solid and dependable, if there is one thing that makes them wobble their collective walking sticks in the air, it is the right of their American empire to kill anyone it doesn’t like, wherever and whenever, in total secrecy.
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Three days before the Israelis unilaterally broke the ceasefire in Gaza on March 18 – for which they received explicit permission from the Trump regime – the US military planned strikes on the only group still offering armed solidarity to Hamas: the Houthis in Yemen. Fumble-fingered national security advisor Michael Waltz mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic and certainly no foe of the regime, to a chat on Signal called “Houthi PC small group.” At 11:44 on the morning of March 15, defense secretary Pete Hegseth (the gin in his tumbler already spilling over, allegedly) posted intimate details of the operational plan including timing of “strike package” launches and the kinds of equipment to be used.
If you ever wanted to know how the sausage gets made, here it is: all the fat and blood and gristle. It’s the kind of detail historians wait decades for, but which we, by their haplessness, get to chew on now. There’s a bit of back-and-forth as JD Vance raises some doubts about protecting shipping lanes on behalf of the Europeans, then tries to get them to foot the munitions bill. Resident ghoul Stephen Miller creaks in as the decisive ventriloquiser of the president’s opinions and gives the green light. “Godspeed to our Warriors,” says Hegseth. “I will say a prayer for victory,” says Vance.
Of course it’s a scandal. The Trumpists can’t put their socks on without doing some kind of crime or scheme. Hegseth and Waltz breached the highest codes of confidentiality and operational security. Trump’s inner circle of courtiers is doing policy planning with flame and bicep emojis. But what it also reveals – starkly, brutally – is the rationale for bombing. One target of the strikes was the Houthis’ “top missile guy” yet there was no tactical discussion at all. What military advantage was gained, and for whom? “The strongest reason to do this,” Vance says, is to “send a message.” Force, in other words, for its own sake. Because they can.
Of all the regime’s sins since its inauguration in January, Democrats have chosen to mobilise what little authority they have left around this one. The Senate Intelligence Committee hurriedly hauled in Tulsi Gabbard and CIA chief John Ratcliffe for a scolding (both of them were in the group chat). Gabbard probably perjured herself. Repeated denials from Trump and Hegseth that there was classified stuff shared in the chat encouraged Jeffrey Goldberg to release a tranche of screenshotted messages (if he weren’t so craven, he would’ve done that when he broke the story on March 24; and what’s Waltz doing with his phone number anyway?).
Suddenly there’s Democrats on television. And they’re angry. Not angry at the bombing, mind you. Angry that the procedures of empire weren’t followed. So here’s Jason Crow of Colorado, crowing on Fox News: “I went to war in Iraq, I went to war in Afghanistan twice,” he said, proving he’s enough of a stooge and an idiot to speak confidently on other stooges and idiots. “Do not tell me that I don’t have real national security concerns. Every single night before I go to bed, every night, I ask myself one simple question: am I keeping faith with the men and women who I have a solemn obligation to keep faith? [sic]”
The similarly-bearded Pat Ryan of New York thinks “there have to be consequences for this…There still has to be accountability in the United States of America, especially with such sensitive national security information.” And his basis for believing so? “Look,” Ryan told MSNBC, “I was an army officer…Friends across the military have been texting me saying ‘Goodness gracious! Had we done this, we know what woulda happened to us’.” Meanwhile Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, flashing her credentials as a former navy chopper pilot, is aghast that “at the top echelons of our government…people don’t seem to understand the need for any national security…You put people in danger.” Ah, but the people in danger were Americans. Not the Yemenis, thirty of whom were killed in the bombing and a hundred others wounded, including children.
Democrats aren’t worried about the war crimes. They cling to their patriotism too firmly for that. They want the war crimes done competently. By their folly and arrogance, the Trump regime interfered with the imperatives of empire, and one of the core principles of the one-party consensus was broken: the duty to inflict massive violence at will, and to do so with your mouth shut. As with the “Russiagate” affair, or the attempted prosecution of Trump for storing classified files in a Mar-a-Lago shitter, or when Fareed Zakaria said eight years ago on CNN that “Trump became president” by bombing Syria, or when Democrats first tried impeachment because the president wasn’t managing the empire’s interests well or secretly enough – the party that is supposed to act as a genuine opposition instead rushes to the defence of the nation’s most compromised and bloody institutions.
It feels like 2017 all over again. During Trump’s first term, at the high-point of feverish worrying about whether he might anoint himself dictator, when the democratic system itself was looking cracked and rickety, where did the Democrats turn? To a sordid clutch of spooks, bureaucrats, and officers – none of them elected, all of them made famous for their starring roles in the War on Terror and who did so much to bring about that threat to democracy in the first place. History repeats. But only if history’s actors are clueless enough to let it.