As the midterm elections approach, Donald Trump isn’t just boasting about his policy of military strikes on civilian boats in international waters — the president is also treating the deadly strikes as some kind of punchline to a tragic joke.

But when he’s not kidding about the policy, he’s bragging about its efficacy. “The United States has carried out dozens of strikes on cartel drug boats, destroying 97% of the drugs coming into the ocean and sea,” Trump boasted in an address to the United Nations last month. “You’ve seen it; they disappear very quickly, and we’re down 90%. They’re down 97%.”

More than a year after the policy was first implemented, this remains at the heart of the White House’s defense: The administration has crushed maritime drug trafficking.

Except, it hasn’t. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Deep in the Amazon, smugglers have shifted shipments east, hiding drugs on boats moving through the rain forest’s vast river network. And on Colombia’s long coast, crews evade U.S. military airstrikes by hugging the shoreline in the exact same speedboats the Americans are targeting.

Record supplies of cocaine still arrive in the U.S., Europe and as far away as Australia every day, cheaper and purer than they’ve been in decades, said law-enforcement officials across four continents.

There’s an important argument to be had about the underlying ends-justify-the-means approach to the use of military force, but this latest reporting is consistent with months’ worth of evidence suggesting the administration’s defense is plainly wrong: The administration is killing a lot of people and destroying a lot of boats, but illicit drugs are reaching the U.S. anyway.

“We cannot bomb our way out of a drug crisis,” Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, explained in a recent statement. “We tried that for decades and it failed. What we need now is law enforcement in the lead, honest accounting from the Pentagon, and a Congress willing to do its job.”

By all appearances, the White House doesn’t care much about these relevant details. On the contrary, The New York Times reported in May that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller chairs bimonthly meetings, apparently called “wins” meetings, at which administration officials are expected to report on various successes.

The Pentagon’s death toll from boat strikes is reportedly “regularly highlighted” as “one of the biggest” such accomplishments.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post More than a year later, Team Trump’s boat strikes continue to fail on multiple fronts appeared first on MS NOW.

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