Republicans Have Gone From ‘Build The Wall’ With Mexico To Let’s Go To War And ‘Bomb Mexico’

Americans have always had an insatiable appetite for drugs. We probably abuse drugs and alcohol more than any other nation on Earth.

The prohibitionists have tried to stop this abuse of drugs and alcohol through criminal penalties and a failed “war on drugs” (which has only produced the highest incarceration rate in the western world). Just as prohibition against alcohol was a miserable failure back in the 1920s.

Drug use is subject to the capitalism law of supply and demand. Americans have an insatiable demand for drugs, and others are going to step in to provide the supply. So long as the demand exists, there will always be those who are willing to provide the supply to make a quick buck. Ah, capitalism.

Politicians always like to blame the suppliers, i.e., the drug cartels, but the real problem lies in Americans’ insatiable appetite for drugs. If there was no demand, there would be no market for the supply. Economics 101. As Cassius said to Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves...” But politicians cannot blame Americans for their insatiable appetite for drug use. Americans can never admit to their own fault.

So we wind up with politicians who want to double-down on the failed “war on drugs.” This is also the capitalism law of supply and demand. We created an infrastructure to fight this “war on drugs,” so the beast we created, the government agencies and criminal justice system, demands ever more of our tax dollars to fight this war. There has to be an enemy to justify ever more appropriations of our tax dollars. The military-industrial-congressional complex is the model for the “war on drugs” complex.

Republicans have gone from “build the wall” with Mexico to let’s go to war and “bomb Mexico,” not over immigration, but over drug cartels supplying fentanyl to to the American market.

Politico reports, GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl:

A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away.

In recent weeks, [failed coup d’état leader and criminal defendant] Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico.

Wait a minute, isn’t this the same guy who campaigned against endless “stupid wars” in 2016, and now he wants to invade the sovereign nation of Mexico in pursuit of the endless stupid “war on drugs”? The suppliers will simply move their base of operations to another location, so long as the demand exists for their supply in the U.S. Well, this is Donald Trump. I suspect he is looking for a cut of the action so he too can make a quick buck off the drug trade.

Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.

“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview.

Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who’s weighing his own presidential run [seriously Dude?], said unilateral military operations “are not going to solve the problem.” [Goddam, I am forced to agree with John Bolton!] And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas), for example, is “still evaluating” the AUMF proposal “but has concerns about the immigration implications and the bilateral relationship with Mexico,” per a Republican staff member on the panel.

But the eagerness of some Republicans to openly legislate or embrace the use of the military in Mexico suggests that the idea is taking firmer root inside the party. And it illustrates the ways in which frustration with immigration, drug overdose deaths and antipathy towards China are defining the GOP’s larger foreign policy.

Nearly 71,000 Americans died in 2021 from synthetic-opioid overdoses — namely fentanyl — far higher than the 58,220 U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam War. And the Drug Enforcement Agency assessed in December that “most” of the fentanyl distributed by two cartels “is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are allergic to the Republican proposals. President Joe Biden doesn’t want to launch an invasion and has rejected the terrorist label for cartels. His team argues that two issued executive orders already expanded law-enforcement authorities to target transnational organizations.

“The administration is not considering military action in Mexico,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said. “Designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not grant us any additional authorities that we don’t already have.” Instead, Watson said the administration hopes to work with Congress on modernizing the Customs and Border Protection’s technologies and making fentanyl a Schedule I drug, which would impose the strictest regulations on its production and distribution.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, told Defense One in an interview last month that invading Mexico was a bad idea. “I wouldn’t recommend anything be done without Mexico’s support,” he said, insisting that tackling the cartel-fueled drug trade is a law enforcement issue.

But should a Republican defeat Biden in 2024, those ideas could become policy, especially if Trump — the GOP frontrunner — reclaims the Oval Office.

As president, Trump considered placing cartels on the State Department’s terrorist blacklist. He also asked about using missiles to take out drug labs and cartels in Mexico, according to former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who wrote in his memoir that he rejected the idea at the time.

But Trump backed away from the move because of the legal complications and fears that bombing Mexico could lead to increased asylum claims at the southern border.

Now a candidate, Trump is reviving his hawkish instincts toward the drug lords. He has already vowed to deploy U.S. special forces to take on drug cartels, “just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate.”

In one policy video released by his campaign, Trump said that if reelected, he would “order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure and operations.”

Just to be clear, this is an act of war against our neighbor, the sovereign nation of Mexico.

And during a recent presidential rally speech in Waco, Texas, Trump compared the number of deaths from fentanyl overdoses to a kind of military attack. [A fentanyl overdose is self-inflicted, not an attack.]

“People talk about the people that are pouring in,” Trump said. “But the drugs that are pouring into our country, killing everybody, killing so many people — there’s no army that could ever do damage to us like that still.”

Other 2024 candidates side with Trump. Using military force on cartels without Mexico’s permission “would not be the preferred option, but we would absolutely be willing to do it,” entrepreneur and conservative activist Vivek Ramaswamy said in an interview. What the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States, he added.

Ramaswamy also said he backs an authorization for the use of military force for “specific” groups: “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the U.S. president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”

Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor and among the more moderate foreign policy voices in his party, openly supports the foreign terrorist organization label for the cartels. “They meet the definition,” he said weeks before announcing his entrance into the 2024 field this month.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is openly against any U.S. military involvement in his country to take on the cartels. “In addition to being irresponsible, it is an offense to the people of Mexico,” he said in March.

But Waltz, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, noted that Colombia’s government was initially resistant to the idea of U.S. military support, too, until both the Clinton and Bush administrations said they were going to send help anyway. “It was only once we delivered some tough messages that they started to shift,” he said, noting attitudes in Bogotá changed as the situation worsened in the country.

Furthermore, Waltz contends that U.S. law enforcement is “overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem by the capability of the cartels.” America should use military cyber weapons to disrupt cartel communications and money flow, he suggested, adding: “If we need some drone support along the border, that’s not something that a law enforcement agency can do, that’s something the military needs to help with.”

But current and former U.S. foreign policy and military officials, including Republicans, say there are glaring problems with the military proposals. “If you thought Iraq was a bad situation, wait until you invade a country on our border,” a House Republican congressional aide said. “Our grandchildren will be dealing with this.”

They cite two main concerns.

The first is that U.S. Northern Command assesses that 30 to 35 percent of Mexican territory is ungoverned, giving space for the drug cartels to roam free. Should the U.S. launch military operations in Mexico, a crush of people would find their way to U.S. ports of entry seeking asylum and their claims would be stronger by fleeing an active war zone involving U.S.-labeled terrorists.

“You’ve just legitimately made it harder to send thousands of people back,” the House GOP staffer said. Doh!

The second issue is that while using force against drug cartels might impact the supply side of the fentanyl crisis, it doesn’t address demand. And past examples of the U.S. military working with a nation to combat drug groups, like in Colombia, were successful, in part, because the host country was committed to the fight and conducted the operations.

There are other complications, such as what the terrorist label would mean for people selling drugs online or shipping them — would a FedEx delivery person be jailed? — and how to stop the sheer volume of imports to Mexico. The Mexican Navy can’t intercept it all, and U.S. forces asked to assist may only catch a small fraction more of what comes into the country.

Still, Republicans see military options as a last-ditch effort to address the crisis roiling Mexico and the United States, and they will continue offering suggestions until a president agrees with them.

“The worst thing we can do is continue to do nothing,” Waltz said.

The Nation adds, What’s Behind the New Calls to Invade Mexico:

[E]mboldened by their success in putting the Biden administration on the defensive about the alleged immigration crisis, Republicans have upped the ante. Going beyond Trumpian calls to “build the wall” to stop border crossings, the new rallying cry on the right is a call to unleash the American military against drug cartels south of the border—even if that means violating Mexican sovereignty.

On January 12, Representative Dan Crenshaw introduced a bill to “authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.” On March 2, former US attorney general Bill Barr lent his support to Crenshaw’s bill in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. On March 7, GOP Senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy held a press conference putting forward the same idea. “If there were an ISIS or Al Qaeda cell in Mexico that lobbed a rocket into Texas,” Graham proclaimed, “we would wipe them off the planet. They [the Mexican drug cartels] are doing that times thousands, and our response is inadequate.”

These calls for military action make no sense. It’s true that drug cartels are a destabilizing force on both sides of the US-Mexico border. But an American military attack done in defiance of the Mexican government would only contribute to further destabilization. It’s no more likely to be successful than the American invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan—and could easily produce a failed state. Ultimately, the fentanyl crisis is a demand problem driven by American consumers.

Yet the shrill war cries of the hard right have been echoed in more modulated tones by centrist publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, which questioned the legitimacy of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government. These more mainstream voices, which also include Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, focused not on drug cartels but on an electoral reform bill that AMLO is pushing. According to David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, “liberal democracy in Mexico is under assault.” Given Frum’s famous contribution as George W. Bush’s speechwriter to the use of pro-democracy rhetoric to justify invading other countries, his intervention is suspect. At the very least, Frum’s thinking suggests the worrying possibility of an alliance between über-reactionaries like Greene and the more polished establishment voices of the foreign policy elite in a shared project of regime change in Mexico.

As the journalist José Luis Granados Ceja noted in The Nation recently, the reforms of the National Electoral Institute that AMLO’s government is pushing through are quite modest, consisting of “the reduction of spending through personnel cuts and some reorganization,” and they in no way “undermine elections in the country.”

The simple truth is that AMLO enjoys mass support in his country as a populist president. Since he took office in December 2018, his approval rating has rarely sunk below 60 percent, a statistic that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden must surely envy. He’s earned popular support with policies like raising the minimum wage and nationalizing lithium stores. On the international stage, AMLO has a habit of thumbing his nose at US policy, whether it concerns the Russia-Ukraine War or the War on Drugs.

Ironically, Republican calls for an invasion of Mexico are likely to buoy AMLO’s popularity even more. Mexicans well remember the long history of gringo attacks on their sovereignty, going back to the wars of the 19th century that cost the country Texas and California, and continuing through Woodrow Wilson’s pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and Donald Trump’s bluster about making Mexico pay for a border wall. Trump also threatened to designate the drug cartels as terrorist organizations, although he never acted on it, to the disappointment of his hard-right supporters. AMLO has shrewdly played up the rhetoric of US hotheads like Dan Crenshaw—a strategy designed to rally Mexican nationalism.

It is AMLO’s political success, rather than his troubles controlling the drug cartels, that is surely the main cause of the new calls for attacking Mexico. AMLO’s populism provokes precisely because many Americans think Mexico is too valuable to be left to the Mexicans. In addition to the traditional Yankee indifference to Mexican sovereignty, the desire to exploit Mexico’s resources is also in play. Brandon Darby, a right-wing activist who has worked with Steve Bannon, offered a clue in a 2019 podcast episode: “The reality of Mexico is this: They’re very resource-rich.” Darby added that if the United States targeted the cartels, it could create a situation in which Mexico will “fall in line in other places so that busi­nesses are more able to invest in Mexico and invest in resource exploitation.” [Yankee imperialism].

If the United States does invade Mexico in the coming years, it will doubtless do so on the pretext of defending democracy and trying to defeat the drug cartels. But behind this rhetoric lies the desire of a weakened superpower to reassert its hegemony and retain control of resource extraction.