(Dobbs) The “fog of war” is not about fire and smoke.What does Hegseth think? That we’re right there in kindergarten with him?
Having covered parts of presidential campaigns for 32 years, from George McGovern to George W. Bush, I’ve always argued that you can’t be stupid and get elected president. Sometimes presidents don’t seem so smart— that’s how Bush came across— but that’s because of the way they present themselves, not the way they think. I’ll say the same about Donald Trump. When people say he’s not so smart, my reply is to ask, “Then how do you think he became president?” He’s crude, he’s corrupt, he’s cruel, but he isn’t stupid. From the rigors of the campaigns I’ve seen to the unparalleled pressure of the Oval Office, you just can’t get there if you’re stupid. That’s why I don’t think we should be debating Trump’s intelligence. But what we should be debating is his immaturity. Although maybe there’s not much to debate. How else do you explain him asking CBS News’s Nancy Cordes last week when she asked him a question he didn’t like, “Are you stupid, are you a stupid person?” Or berating ABC’s Mary Bruce the week before with, “You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.” Or days before that, in his crown achievement of callousness, addressing Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey as “piggy.” All three are their news organizations’ chief White House correspondents. All three are female. Attacking them the way he did is a sure sign, even at the age of 79, of immaturity. And he doesn’t stop at journalists. Just the day before yesterday during a meeting of his fawning cabinet, he tore into Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. “Ilhan Omar is garbage,” he said in front of God and everybody. ”She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.” Donald Trump behaves like he’s in kindergarten. Except that sometimes you can teach a kindergartener who is acting out that he’s wrong. Not possible with Trump. In his nauseously narcissistic mind, he’s never wrong. The difference between him and a six-year-old is, when the six-year-old misbehaves in class, there’s an adult in the room to bring discipline. When Trump holds court, there are no adults in the room at all. So the president of the United States is irredeemably immature. But maybe among his Cabinet colleagues, he doesn’t win first prize. That might go instead to the utterly unqualified man he picked for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. Tuesday Hegseth made the most astonishing statement, doing his damndest to evade personal responsibility for what Senator Angus King correctly called “a stone-cold war crime”: the September drone strike on an alleged narco-trafficking boat in the Caribbean that killed two men after an earlier strike left them defenseless but alive, clinging to the wreckage: “I did not personally see survivors…. because that thing was on fire and was exploded, and fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s, this is called the fog of war.” A few lessons for our secretary of defense. 1. The “fog of war” is not about fire and smoke. It’s not about an optical fog. It’s about a brain fog, It’s about the confusion amidst the chaos of war. 2. After being coined by a Prussian military analyst almost 200 years ago, the phrase about the fog of war had its first appearance in English in McDonald Clark’s poem about the Revolutionary War, “The Battle of Bunker Hill.” 3. As for “you got digital,” Clark wrote his poem in 1836, before anyone “got digital.” And more lessons, Mr. Secretary: You claimed when The Washington Post first broke the story about the two men’s deaths— arguably the two men’s murders— that it was “fabricated.” Which makes me wonder, which part was fabricated? The part about you following up on your original order to “kill everybody” by calling for the second strike, or the part about somebody in your command, but not you, committing a war crime? You originally seemed to think you could just say that the whole story was fabricated. Until you couldn’t. The lesson is, you are not in the clear. Even if a cooperative admiral named Mitch Bradley, who heads Special Ops Command, took your cue as you claim and gave the order for the second strike, you are above him in the chain of command. And of course your boss is even higher in the chain than you. The boss of course has his “get out of jail free” card for “official acts,” courtesy of the United States Supreme Court. But you, Pete, don’t. Of course Monday night you put on your “Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” face and wrote on X, “Let’s make one thing crystal clear. Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support,” followed by, “When this @DeptofWar says we have the back of our warriors — we mean it.” Which is exactly what you didn’t do. You threw the guy under the bus so you can stay in the driver’s seat. Writing that “this moral slum” of the Trump administration “should nauseate Americans,” The Washington Post’s George Will put it well: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” One thing manifestly missing from Trump’s and Hegseth’s moral slum is the phrase popularized by President Harry Truman and immortalized in a plaque on his desk: “The buck stops here.” Trump must have thrown that out of the Oval when he threw out everything else that showed even a modicum of modesty and good taste, and covered that hallowed place in faux Home Depot gold. But Trump himself has the same sense of dishonor as his defense secretary. His mea-non-culpa about the strike that murdered two men who’d already been taken out of action was, “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine, and if there were two people around, but Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence.” After the feral rhetoric that has oozed from Donald Trump’s lips about narco-traffickers, does anyone really believe him when he says, “I wouldn’t have wanted that?” Something else he “wouldn’t have wanted” is surfacing: the report from the Pentagon’s inspector general, scheduled for release today, about Hegseth’s dangerous dispersal of information in March on an everyday app called Signal, which any amateur programmer could hack, about an American strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen. For one thing, he gave details of the pending attack in real time. For another, he shared the timeline not just with others on the national security team, who have clearances, but with his brother and his wife, who don’t. Showing off is another sure sign of immaturity. And, carelessly beyond description, the information also got shared with a journalist who somehow got added to the list. Hegseth was so shockingly specific that on one of the time markers he even noted, “This is DEFINITELY when the first bombs will drop.” Wouldn’t any of America’s enemies have been delighted to have a look at that?! What the inspector general has concluded is, by sharing such sensitive data, Hegseth endangered our troops and even the whole operation. Of course here too Hegseth ducked responsibility, claiming that he had declassified everything he shared. Which only makes him seem even more reckless, since what he shared was a blow-by-blow plan for the attack. But the guy was too immature to understand that. Then again, what do you expect from someone with white nationalist symbols tattooed on his chest? It’s a safe bet that no other secretaries of defense in American history looked like this when they took off their shirts. And what do you expect from someone who finds the deaths he orders up on the high seas so amusing that he publishes a meme of a cartoon character named Franklin the Turtle firing a rocket launcher into a boat. What does Hegseth think? That we’re right there in kindergarten with him? As George Will wrote in that column about the moral slum, “A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.” As long as Trump has widespread support for his policies and his people, maybe this nation is incapable of shame. Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. You can learn more at GregDobbs.net |