"War is Hell"

Pete Hegseth was asked yesterday about the four U.S. service members who had already lost their lives at that point due to Trump's illegal Iran bombing. (Now, it's up to six.) He blithely responded: "War is hell and always will be." 

War? What war? I thought we were just engaged in a "strike" or a "special operation" of some sort. If this is a war, then the U.S. Constitution is very clear who has the authority to make it: Congress, not the president. 

Which means that these six Americans lost their lives in a war that the same Constitution they swore to defend forbids, and which Trump and Hegseth had no legal authority to undertake. 

Hegseth probably didn't think about that. His brain is a festering cesspool of masculine insecurity, social media provocation, and TV-ready showmanship. 

The fact that this is not a meme, or a chance to troll anyone or complain about "wokeness"—but an actual illegal war in which hundreds of human beings have already lost their lives—is something he is not mentally equipped to fathom. 

What would we say if we were face to face with the parents of those six American service members who have been killed—a grieving mother or father whose "son/ Is slain in brutish battle / Though he has injured none"—to quote Thomas Hardy? 

Would we shrug and say: "war is hell and always will be"? 

Or, if we were in Hegseth's shoes, would we pause to reflect: given that war is hell, maybe we shouldn't start so many illegal and unconstitutional ones purely for purposes of social media posturing and little-man bravado? 

Since war is hell—and actual human beings are dying in this one already, including American soldiers and Iranian schoolchildren—maybe we have a responsibility not to undertake ill-considered wars for idiotic and unpatriotic purposes? 

I don't think Hegseth is capable of that thought. I don't think he or his boss is aware of the existence and rights of other human beings. I think he cannot see past his next TV appearance or how he will look on screen. 

In his poem about the soldiers killed in the no less criminal U.S. colonial invasion of the Philippines, William Vaughn Moody condemned the stupidity and evil of statesmen who send Americans to die in a dishonorable and unconstitutional cause. 

Likewise, the blood of these six servicemen and women are on Hegseth's and Trump's hands. They signed up to defend their country and its Constitution. And now they are dead, because Hegseth and his boss betrayed that Constitution. 

And they are far from the only dead. There are also all those Iranian schoolchildren killed by an errant bomb in the south of the country; the hundreds of other civilians who have already lost their lives. 

All those Iranian soldiers too, killed in an illegal war that they never chose—which makes their deaths nothing short of murder. Let us remember their humanity too.

Were they all evil people, though, who deserved it—because they signed up to serve and defend an evil government (which the Iranian theocratic regime surely is)? 

Or were they just people who "thought [they]'d 'list/ Off-hand like— just as I — Was out of work — had sold [their] traps / No other reason why," as Hardy put it in "The Man He Killed." 

In other words—maybe they signed up for their country's armed forces for the same reason so many U.S. soldiers do: they needed the money. 

Maybe all those people on Iranian ships and bases aren't terrible people either, but just people who made a humanly-understandable choice in a world of limited and imperfect options. 

Maybe they also loved, had families, had dreams, had ambitions. "Whatever hope is yours / was my life also," as Wilfred Owen wrote in "Strange Meeting." 

And who are all these people being killed? These hundreds of names and faces and identities and stories and biographies disappearing in a cloud of smoke and fire? Will we ever know more about them? 

Let us pause for a moment to see the humanity of these unknown dead—the ones Harold Pinter commemorated, in a poem he read aloud in 2005 in protest against the Bush administration's no less murderous war in Iraq: 

Who was the father or daughter or brother

Or uncle or sister or mother or son

Of the dead and abandoned body?