Is It A War Crime? Ask The Babylon Bee

With accusations flying of war crimes on the high seas, you may find yourself asking: what really constitutes a war crime? Let us help unpack this complex issue and break down what does and doesn't make someone a war criminal:

A soldier using more than one bullet: WAR CRIME. Shooting a gun a second time is why the Geneva Convention had to happen

Bioengineering a virus in a Chinese lab that kills millions and shuts down the entire world: Nah, it's cool.

Assassinating political leaders you disagree with: Not a crime. Brave and stunning.

Paragliding into a festival and kidnapping, murdering women and children: Nope. A peaceful act of resistance.

Converting the East Wing of the White House into a ballroom: WAR CRIME. We demand blood!

Putting pineapple on pizza: War crime, peace crime, spiritual crime, everything crime.

Air dropping food to help the civilians of the country that invaded yours: WAR CRIME. People having to walk several yards to retrieve a food crate is dehumanizing.

Snapping half of all organic life out of existence: Not a war crime. It's called going green. Educate yourself.

Killing an enemy combatant, then putting a Santa hat on him and writing "NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN HO-HO-HO" on his sweater in his blood: Totally awesome but, yes, technically a war crime.

We hope these key examples give you a good grasp of the war crime concept. Think we missed any important examples? Let us know in the comments below.

Cartels have been fairly effective in the past at using violence to shape a response (leaders of narco-states are intimidated into following cartel orders if they were not already inclined to do so). The Trump administration has simply reversed the paradigm and is trying the strategy of large-scale violent deterrence of the cartels.

This is an asymmetric strategy because when applied to governments, it will be effective partly because government is always going to be there to receive the message. A cartel could in theory just vaporize and re-form as something totally different.

Just as the Cosa Nostra changed a lot of its structure and operations in response to government scrutiny, cartels will probably continue to shift shapes. There will be drug dealers as long as there are customers for the product, just as there will always be alcoholic beverages and prostitution, cigarettes, extreme martial arts fighting, and internet trolling. You cannot legislate these things out of existence. But you can increase the cost of doing business. A logical response from the cartels would be, okay, we will get into U.S. politics and support the Democrats (I think they likely did this back a few decades, but even more so perhaps). Also the cartels could say, let’s sell more in Europe, in China and India, Japan, wherever the going is easier for us. And they could respond with more Mexican style intimidation of U.S. politicians (all this is equally true in Canada where, contrary to what Donald Trump has implied, police activity against narco gangs is at least as robust as it is in America, if not more so, perhaps because it is a little harder to hide a large fentanyl operation in Canada than in America given the smaller number of locations that operation could exist). I am familiar with at least three large-scale fentanyl and drug busts in rural areas of Canada in recent years, and this despite a widespread suspicion that the Trudeau Liberal government was soft on drug crime. Police in Canada are largely under provincial direction — the RCMP sounds like it is a federal police force but in fact it is broken up into provincial operating units that replace local police in some (mostly rural) jurisdictions. Recently the large Vancouver suburb of Surrey replaced the RCMP as their police force with a dedicated urban police force as Vancouver has, but other large regional cities like Burnaby still have an RCMP police force. Across the western provinces it is a patchwork quilt of RCMP and local forces. In Ontario and Quebec there are provincial police forces rather than using the RCMP.

We don’t hear what cartels do to intimidate police or politicians but I assume it is something rather than nothing. So we are in no position to say whether or not any particular levels of government or individual politicians are cartel-friendly. Some must be bought off, you would think, or intimidated into looking the other way. Even motorcycle gangs have used that approach with some success in the past.

I don’t question Trump’s bravery of course, but you have to wonder what messages he or other high rankers have received during the past few months. It might restrict the mobility of said persons even if they are very brave. If I were an advisor to Donald Trump and he said he wanted to do a tour of the southwestern U.S. with multiple speaking engagements, I would be inclined to say, are you sure about security?

Prediction — there will be an identifiable cartel response, in other words, the other shoe will drop, at some point in 2026. Where, when and what, I have no idea, but it could be a soft target followed by a warning, like back off or there will be more of this. This is what terrorists do, they create fear (maybe not terror).

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