After a weekend spent starting another war in the Middle East, the United States Secretary of Defense — gosh, sorry, I mean the United States SECRETARY OF WAR — made an appearance in front of the nation on Monday morning.
And if anyone was hoping for reassurance from Pete Hegseth at this juncture, they weren’t about to get it, because apparently his entire speech had been written by a teenage boy in between lengthy stints of launching raids on Counter Strike.
It started out with a pre-emptive defense of Operation Epic Fury, the name of the military operation (alongside June’s “Operation War Hammer”) which must’ve been chosen by the same teenage boy who wrote the speech.
Gone are the nice little hand-wringy, committee-approved titles given by former presidents like Biden (Operation Atlantic Resolve), Obama (Inherent Resolve, Odyssey Dawn), and George W Bush (Enduring Freedom, Noble Eagle.) Because what kind of image do those pussyfooting titles conjure up?! Not LETHAL ones, that’s for sure!
Hegseth did a quick run-through of the things America was apparently avenging by starting the war on Saturday morning: “brothers who never came home,” because of a litany of decades-long sins, including “roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Conspicuously absent were the lines about urgency and imminent danger that had briefly been tested over the weekend, even though he did talk about stopping nuclear and defensive capabilities because “crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.”
No, now it was actually all about Donald Trump righteously avenging every wrong having ever been done to every American servicemember over multiple generations.
“A man who always puts Americans first” was now going to “finally draw the line after 47 years of Iranian belligerence.”
How surprised those MAGA voters must be to hear that’s who Donald Trump is, rather than the Donald Trump they voted for, who they saw speaking at rallies around the country about how he would “end the forever wars” and concentrate solely on “America first.” But hey, people change!
Having prepped us with a bit of history, Hegseth then launched into a full gaslighting exercise: “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we are finishing it,” he said, of the war started by America and Israel two days prior.
“This was not a regime change war,” he added, of the war that specifically targeted the Iranian regime and minutes before Hegseth himself urged Iranian protesters to rise up and change their government, “but the regime did change.”
And “to the political left screaming ‘endless wars’: Stop.” Oh, OK then!
The speech got rapidly darker as it continued, escalating quickly from a we-were-just-getting-our-own-back vibe to “If you threaten Americans anywhere on this earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.”
And if Americans die in the process of that hunting-down, then that loss is simply folded back into the justification for more war.
Because, like President Trump said, “there will be casualties,” and the way to “honor them” is to have “no apologies, no hesitation, epic fury,” since, Hegseth added — directly addressing US troops at this point — “history doesn’t care if we’re tired, if we’re scared or if the fight feels bad.”
“Warrior ethos, lethality and union of purpose” are “the beating heart of what it means to wear the uniform,” he continued, a metaphor so horrifically mangled that it really did evoke the true human cost of war.
“Turns out the regime that chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel,” he added, with a little self-satisfied smirk, a line so cringey and unserious that my toes involuntarily curled.
But look, there are some things that Hegseth and I can agree on. One of them is that deluded people in the service of cult-like devotion should never be put in charge of lethal weapons.
And on an unconnected note, it was really interesting how many times in this speech Hegseth went right back to Donald Trump himself, rather than to the homeland or to the Iranian people (mentioned exactly once) or to peace in the Middle East (remember the Board of Peace, now launching its first war just a couple weeks after its formation? One imagines its remit might be about to change quite considerably.)
Letting Iran run riot “almost happened under Obama, but not under this president,” Hegseth said. This whole Iranian missile thing “takes guts, and our president has guts.” (Your life is a sacrifice he’s willing to make!) “President Trump puts America first,” he repeated, as if the saying of it might make it seem true. And finally, most chillingly: “We will finish this” at a time and on the terms of “President Trump’s choosing, no one else’s.”
Yes, calling out damaging, delusional hero-worship while saying this all was certainly a choice.
Then there were the really worrying parts — and yes, truly all the parts were worrying, but over the years I’ve become fairly adept at separating out the worrying from the worrying.
There was the talk about acting with impunity alongside Israel, “regardless of what so-called international institutions say” (videos from inside Iran showed patients — including a newborn baby in an incubator — being evacuated into the street from the Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, which appeared to have been heavily damaged by shrapnel.)
There was the claim about “no politically correct wars,” in contrast with countries that “clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force” (Iran reported over 150 people dead from a missile strike on a girls’ school conducted on Saturday, the first day of the Iranian school week.)
There was the repeated use of the word “lethal,” dropped in again and again and again, and juxtaposed with an eyebrow-raisingly foolish insistence that America can stop this war any time it likes. Because the Iranian people should “take their chance and rise up,” as if they are a well-armed militia rather than a normal society of moms and dads and kids and scholars and workers who were deliberately kept from organizing by a repressive regime for decades and are hardly in a good position to suddenly wage war against their own country’s army because Israel and America dropped a couple of bombs.
“We are not defenders any more,” Hegseth told a nation of Americans who, polls show, really just want their homeland to be safe and their gas prices and groceries to be low while salaries stagnate (gas prices are about to skyrocket, predicted most analysts on Monday, as the price of oil went sharply up following the US’s strikes on Iran and the consequent chaos.) “We are warriors, trained to kill the enemy and break their will.”
To the troops, he added, “don’t listen to the noise” and “stay focused.” To others, don’t read the “fake news.” In fact, just don’t listen to anything. Don’t look at the media reports. All we have up here is what you need. The president will end this at a time of his choosing. Who asked for this? Stop asking questions. It doesn’t matter any more.
And by the way, Pete Hegseth’s wife is praying for you!
May Jesus smile down on the unforgiving, merciless, death-oriented, non-woke, super-lethal troops of America as they hunt down and kill everybody in their path who ever hurt them. It’s what he would have wanted.
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