Secretary Mattis is urging extra-constitutional war-making. And almost no one has noticed.

The way the Washington Post covered the story––and the failure of many media outlets to cover it at all––stem in large part from the anemia of America’s anti-war movement. That isn’t a criticism of the small group actively engaged in that cause: It is an observation that very few Americans are active, whether that means street protests or writing letters to Congress or working within the infrastructure of the political parties.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been at war, the longest continuous conflict in its history. Its citizens have witnessed a failed surge into Afghanistan, a catastrophe in Iraq that helped destabilize vast swaths of the Middle East, an unconstitutional war in Libya that created a power vacuum exploited by ISIS, and a drone war that has killed hundreds of innocents in a half-dozen countries. The last two presidents campaigned against dumb wars and won. The more interventionist candidate has lost every election since 2008.

Yet the anti-war faction that mobilized against the Iraq War shrunk precipitously during the Obama years, and is less noisy as Trump takes office than anti-pipeline protesters.

Meanwhile, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy—that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found—and in doing so, has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed. The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the United States targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an eight-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).”

The absence of significant protests in the face of this inhumane militarism is a major reason why it is neither emphasized in the press nor kept in check by the most effective brake on killing among those who lack a moral compass: political consequences. Trump and most Republicans won’t worry about civilian deaths until they’re affected by them. Neither will most Democrats.

That isn’t to say that there are no skeptics. Here’s Senator Rand Paul speaking about Yemen policy at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing earlier this month:

We’re supplying the Saudis with bombs, refueling the planes, picking the targets. I assume that we didn’t pick the target of a funeral procession, but we wounded 500 people and 140 people — I say “we;” the Saudis did it, but with our armaments. You think that Yemenis don’t know where the bombs are coming from? We recently had a raid — and I don’t blame our soldiers. I mean, I have members of my family who actively serve. They do what they’re told. But we’re the policymakers. I mean, we sent them into Yemen. I’ve still not been told why we went to Yemen. Someone’s got to make a decision: Did we — in killing, you know, a few of the al Qaeda members in that village — was that worth the fact that we had to kill women and children, or women and children were inadvertently killed in that, including an American citizen? I guess my question to Dr. Rand is: Do you think we’re adequately weighing whether we’re creating more terrorists than we kill, whether we’re doing more good than we are doing harm, whether we are safer or more risk? I think your testimony was at least reasoned in the sense that it asked will we be better off. Yes, we can take a new port in Yemen. We can do anything. But in the end, will we be safer, better off if we continue the way we’re continuing?

Paul’s skeptical view of interventionism and frank inquiries about potential blowback put the Kentucky Republican in a minority faction within his political party.