Straining at a gnat, swallowing a camel

By John M. Crisp / Tribune News Service

President Donald Trump and Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, at first glance, do not look like a natural match.

Hegseth joined the Minnesota Army National Guard in 2003 and served tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump, on the other hand, followed the path of other white guys with resources and avoided military service altogether during the Vietnam War, largely thanks to a highly questionable diagnosis of bone spurs.

But both Trump and Hegseth are deeply attracted to the trappings of the military — uniforms, parades, flyovers, high-powered weapons and big explosions — and neither is very concerned about the norms, standards, rules and laws that our nation and the world have developed in the effort to impose some limits on the most brutal of all of humanity’s activities: making war.

Thus we have a spectacular exhibition of war-making writ small currently taking place in the Caribbean. The explosions produced by rockets slamming into speedboats are dramatic, the destruction impressive.

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