WHAT I'D BE SAYING ABOUT THE BOAT STRIKES IF I WERE A TRUMP CRITIC IN CONGRESS

I know we're all focused on the legality of the September 2 "double tap" strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean. But because I think many Americans don't care what harm comes to brown people who appear to be smuggling drugs that are killing Americans in large numbers, I wonder if the most effective line of attack on this undeclared war is to question its legality.

I keep thinking about a paragraph that appeared in a Washington Post story yesterday:

Still, the Defense Department has privately acknowledged to lawmakers that nearly all of the strikes have targeted suspected shipments of cocaine — rather than fentanyl, the leading cause of U.S. overdose deaths. Moreover, most of the narcotics moved through the Caribbean are headed toward Europe and Western Africa rather than the United States.

Yes, we should talk about legality -- America shouldn't be run by proud war criminals. But let's also start asking: Are we putting American servicemembers in harm's way to prevent shipments of drugs to other countries? I thought the policy of this administration was "America First." And given the fact that fentanyl is the drug that's doing the most harm to America, do we have any evidence whatsoever that we're targeting shippers of fentanyl?

The paragraph quoted above links to an earlier Washington Post story that raises serious questions about the purpose of these boat attacks. (I'm continuing to treat reporting from the Post as reliable because the news side of the paper is still clearly a serious journalistic enterprise. It hasn't followed the opinion section into right-wing hackery.) First, it's not clear that their real purpose of the attacks is to stop the flow of drugs:

The military strikes ... [have] brought U.S. forces into striking distance of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro....

“When I saw [an internal document on the strikes],” a senior U.S. national security official said, “I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change.’ But there was no information about what it was really about.”

We're clearly headed for a war with Venezuela -- another war for oil. Many Americans, especially young men, voted for Trump last year in the belief that he'd be less likely than Kamala Harris to embroil us in a forever war. Across the political spectrum, ordinary Americans want to avoid another war for oil. Why not talk more about that?

And if these are strikes aimed at the drug trade, it's not the drug trade that does the most harm to America.

... records and interviews with 20 people familiar with the route or the strikes, including current and former U.S. and international officials, contradict the administration’s claims. The [targeted] passage, they said, is not ordinarily used to traffic synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, present in 69 percent of drug overdose deaths last year. Nor are the drugs typically headed for the United States.

Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean nation more than 1,000 miles south and 1,200 miles east of Miami, is both a destination market for marijuana and a transshipment point for South American cocaine bound for West Africa and Europe, according to U.S. officials, Trinidadian police and independent analysts. The fentanyl seized in the U.S., in contrast, is typically manufactured in Mexico using precursors from China and smuggled in through the land border, most often by U.S. citizens....

Most of the South American cocaine bound for North America flows through the Pacific, but some does depart Venezuela through the Caribbean, according to U.S. officials and analysts who track drug routes. Much of it courses overland through the western states of Zulia and Falcón before shipping northward to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic. Some travels by air, departing clandestine airstrips in Maracaibo or Apure state for Central America and onward to Mexico and the United States.

It’s less common, investigators say, to ship U.S.-bound cocaine from the northeastern state of Sucre across the narrow Bocas del Dragón channel to Trinidad — the route the administration has targeted. Trinidad is used far more frequently as a gateway to Europe....

One recently retired senior Trinidadian police official, asked whether Sucre traffickers were bringing drugs intended for the United States, chuckled.

“Why would they use Trinidad and Tobago to transport drugs to the United States, when you have Colombia and Mexico and all of these other places that are closer?”

So are we really launching these strikes in order to stop opioids from coming into America? And if not, what are we really doing and why are we doing it?