As we witness the Democrats gearing up to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, we might pause to ask whether they are going to charge him with offenses that were common practice under the three prior Democratic presidents?

X.com ^ | Nov 10, 2026 | Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson

[ransomnote]

As we witness the Democrats gearing up to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, we might pause to ask whether they are going to charge him with offenses that were common practice under the three prior Democratic presidents?

If Hegseth ordered strikes on suspected terrorists and drug smugglers, he and President Trump were only following the precedents of Barack Obama.
Without congressional authorization, Obama ordered about 550 targeted drone assassination strikes along the Afghan, Syrian, and Iraqi borders over his tenure.

Obama also likely had fatally droned between 2,300 and 2,500 suspected terrorists in addition to anywhere from 380 to 800 innocent civilians.
And the Obama strikes killed five U.S. citizens.

His CIA director John Brennan in 2011 deliberately lied under oath to the Congress when he stated there was no collateral damage at all during these targeted assassinations, insisting no civilians had been killed. Brennan later admitted that was an abject lie—one that the Congress excused.

Will the impeachment writs against Hegseth claim that he went to war against Iran without congressional authority?

If so, he was only following the earlier model of Bill Clinton who bombed Serbia for 78 days without congressional authority, or Barack Obama who, also without the ascent of Congress, bombed Libya for seven months.

In Clinton’s case, the bombing killed at least 500 civilians—although the Serbian government estimated that between 1,200 and 2,000 citizens died by American bombing. Among the collateral damage was the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Note further that most estimates put Obama’s civilian fatality rate during his Libyan bombing at between 200 and 400 deaths.

Also recall that Bill Clinton eventually hit dual-use targets that included the power grid of Belgrade, oil refineries, civilian airports, and many of the bridges on the Danube. The Obama Libyan bombing targeted civilian airports, ports and dock works, and communications centers.

So far in Iran, the Trump-Hegseth bombing has largely avoided dual-use targets such as the television stations, civilian airports, and power stations. And to the degree civilians were killed in Iran, it was largely due to the Iranian government's deliberate strategy of placing military targets and command and control centers next to schools, hospitals, and mosques - in the fashion that was routinely adopted by Hamas in the Gazan war.

Democrats claim they will additionally impeach Hegseth for firing top generals without sufficient cause.

Will they again follow the Clinton-Obama examples?

Clinton, remember, fired Gen. Harold Campbell, for speaking disrespectfully about Clinton—for saying things about Clinton at a private banquet of officers that paled in comparison to the public invective directed at Trump by retired generals and admirals during his first term.

But Obama may have set the record for firing the most and highest-ranking generals, many seemingly without good cause.

Gen Stanley McChrystal was in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan at a very critical juncture in 2010. But when a private conversation was leaked to Rolling Stone quoting McChrystal making a disparaging remark about the Obama administration, he was summarily recalled and fired.

Most infamously, Obama fired Gen. James Mattis who was leading CentCom in 2013 because he was felt to be too bellicose or did not reflect the Obama Iranian policy, which was largely one of appeasement.

And do we remember how Obama not only fired Gen. Michael Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but later used the FBI and the DOJ to entrap him, which eventually led to his firing from his Trump-appointed National Security Advisor billet.

There is talk that the impeachment writs will include charges that Hegseth “illegally” waged war against Yemen.

But again, if so, Hegseth was a piker compared to prior administrations. Review the vast number of countries that Clinton, Obama, and Biden during their administrations bombed without congressional authority or much of any explanation at all to the American people. Their targeted nations list included Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, the former Yugoslavia, and Yemen.

Perhaps most laughable will be the impeachment writ that Hegseth used an unsecure platform for communications, a lapse that did not lead to any known compromised personnel or information given to foreign interests. In contrast, do we remember the Robert Hanssen spy case when for years an FBI agent walked off with thousands of Pentagon top-secret dossiers and files and sold them to the Russians?

Even worse was the 1999 Dr. Wen Ho Lee breach at Los Alamos when the Pentagon had to completely overhaul its security methodology, given Lee’s theft of classified design details for U.S. nuclear warheads.

One could argue that the Obama administration allowed more egregious leakage of military classified information than any presidency in history. Have the current impeachment zealots forgotten the Edward Snowden leaks of 2013, when he targeted both NSA and Pentagon digital infrastructure, creating existential risks for U.S. surveillance operations abroad and harming our allies?

Nor should we forget the 2013 Chelsea Manning WikiLeaks disaster. He/she downloaded more than 700,000 classified military logs and diplomatic cables, and completely compromised and embarrassed the Obama Pentagon.

Nor should we omit the Jack Teixeira leaks during the Pentagon tenure of Secretary Lloyd Austin in the Biden administration. Teixeira photographed top-secret Pentagon intelligence briefings and posted them on a chat server. He gave away classified Pentagon assessments of almost everything known to be going on at that time in Ukraine.

No one, of course, blamed Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for such an egregious leak, or his secretive two-weeks AWOL from Pentagon.

Do we remember all of the melodramas, psychodramas, and scandals of defense secretaries themselves during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations? In 1996, during the tenure of Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Perry, the White House dumped Monica Lewinsky into a public affairs job at the Pentagon, as part of an stealthy attempt to keep her out of sight and sound.

Maybe we should consider lifting the statute of limitations to retroactively impeach or indict the Obama secretaries of defense in 2013, Hagel and Panetta. Their tenures coincided with the greatest corruption bribery and fraud case in US naval history conducted by so-called “Fat Leonard”. He was a notorious defense contractor who bribed all sorts of top Navy officials with travel, cash, and, yes, prostitutes and he bilked the Pentagon out of at least $35 million.

An internal Pentagon study was buried that might have saved $125 billion in sheer administrative waste and under Panetta. Do we remember the Obama training and equipment disaster, in which secretary Panetta’s Pentagon program spent $500 million and yet produced only four or five active Syrian fighters on the battlefield.

During the tenure of Secretary Lloyd Austin, the DoD completely failed to conduct a mandatory financial audit every single year of Austin's tenure.
In sum, if we applied the delusional standards of the current McCarthyite impeachers to past Pentagon officials, then there would have been dozens of Democratic appointees impeached—and convicted.

As for Hegseth’s own record, in a single year he had corrected Lloyd Austin’s chronic military recruitment shortfalls.

The removal of the thuggish dictator Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, and the June 2025 one-off strike on the Iranian nuclear sites went flawlessly without a single fatality.

As for the Iran War, compared to prior misadventures in the Middle East, so far the United States has lost far fewer fatalities (23) than the daily rate accident on the military outside the Iranian war theater. And despite the unfortunate April halt in finishing the job that led to six months of inconsequential talk, and spiraling gas prices, Hegseth had logically objected to the on-off again negotiations that only encouraged Iranian haggling that dragged the conflict into the midterms.

As far as cost, the Iran war may exceed $50 billion, but perhaps still less than the total damage in dollars that Joe Biden committed in the catastrophic 2021 scramble from Kabul. His Pentagon left behind billions of dollars’ worth of military bases, a new embassy, infrastructure, vehicles, equipment, and the latest military hardware—much of which the Taliban put up for sale on the international terrorist Mart.

In short, if the next two years follow this anticipated impeachment circus, then Donald Trump will probably leave office in January 2029 with his highest popularity ratings of his entire presidency.

---

TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS:

[SkyDancer]

It will be conveniently forgotten or ignored.

[Fai Mao]

VDH needs to remember that as far as Shitocrats are concerned “Right is what we do to others. Wrong is what they do to us.”

Guilt is irrelevant.

[Sacajaweau]

It’s already been voted down. Dead in the water!