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Esper: Mother of All Bombs for Muslims, Not Narcos
According to our political establishment, it is acceptable to kill Muslims with any weapon up to the MOAB, nicknamed the Mother Of All Bombs. Our political and national defense elites need not alert the host country, nor offer any warning or legal process to Muslims we deem terrorists. Yet, none of this applies to narcos, not even the most powerful men in Mexico, who traffic far more death across our southern border annually than all the Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil since we announced the Global War on Terror.
I am sure that Mark Esper thinks himself quite the reasonable fellow and consummate professional. Yet, his self-interested telling of President Trump’s interactions with members of the national security bureaucracy reflects poorly on him and his gang, while making Donald J. Trump sound far more connected with the American people and our real national security interests. Take as true the claim that President Trump wanted to do to the top drug lords what he did to the top Iranian general in charge of international terrorist operations. Now explain to anyone without an Ivy League indoctrination why our intelligence and military assets were not promptly and precisely employed to decapitate the cartels.
But Mexico is a sovereign county with which we are not at war. True, just like Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan is a nuclear power and quite touchy about its place in the world. Yet, presidents from Bush the Younger to Trump sanctioned strikes with munitions inside Pakistan’s borders. We never alerted the Pakistani government in advance, especially when we sent an elite team on a raid to kill or capture Osama bin Laden.
We have at least an equal interest in violently disrupting the cartels that control trafficking of everything from drugs to women and children. The cartels run a distribution system that reaches every community and connects to street-level gangs. So, we can rightly hold them accountable for the record number of overdose deaths and the thousands gunned down on our city streets annually.
Beyond holding cartel leaders accountable for killing Americans on American soil, we have a national security interest in stopping their armed forces that control substantial portions of Mexico and that have extended their special operations reach into our territory for years. The signs in the Arizona desert warning Americans not to proceed on public land because of the threat of death from armed foreign forces were posted over a decade ago. The bullets could come from two sources. First, the coyotes were armed. Second, cartels were reportedly using serious men, mercenary snipers, to overwatch their off-road routes through the Arizona desert.
Deeper and closer to the heartland, there are already towns in our country that are governed by a cartel shadow government, with no one daring to oppose their interests in the movement of drugs and other commodities, including human beings.
The level of organization and danger posed to our national security on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border prompted the late great @bossmongo to write a masterful fictional account of a secret operation by elite U.S. troops to draw out and then wipe out cartel armed forces on ground of our choosing in our desert. See Operation MESAS VANTAGE in ten parts.
Pakistan and Mexico are both weak states, with parallel governments run by violent men who mean us harm and whose organizations have in fact killed thousands of Americans on our own soil. Both national governments could not be trusted to cooperate in kill or capture operations against these parallel ruling entities. Both Mexico and Pakistan are deeply compromised by outlaw organizations, with informers or allies in their national and domestic security organizations. This was never better illustrated than when elite American troops killed bin Laden in a compound near a Pakistani military installation.
Decapitating the cartels, combined with an all-out campaign against their financial and logistics systems, would not end drug trafficking or sex trafficking. These have always been with us and always will. However, there is a massive difference in scale and lethality felt in our communities, facilitated by serious organization and financing. Further, breaking the cartels is a necessary precondition for Mexicans to have any chance at domestic government reform, developing a more stable society from which people need not trek north for economic opportunity.
Yet, our entire political establishment is set against serious action against this external source of death and injury in our homeland. I was struck by McConnell cheering senior members of his Senate gang going to Kiev, supporting spending another $40 billion dollars on that nation’s security. That same gang has never gone to our southern border, especially during the Obama and Biden regime-induced surges. Mitch and the gang actively resisted spending a single dollar on building a single mile of real barrier on our southern border. President Trump had to find a loophole in existing laws to reallocate about a tenth of what Mendacious Mitch McConnell and his whole crew want to spend on defending Ukrainian territorial integrity.
So, Esper and all the perfumed princes of the Pentagon have been acting in conformity with the long-term establishment view in D.C. and other elite bubbles. It was President Trump’s disruption of this cozy consensus that was truly shocking and threatening, causing the likes of Esper and Barr to blame Trump and us for violating norms or expecting actions that just were not cricket. We need to double down on candidates who share our view and who reject received elite wisdom. If a drone strike is good enough for an Iranian terror master, it is good enough for a Mexican drug lord.
As I wrote in “Tales from Arizona,”
Published in Group WritingThe Arizona Republic tells of families murdered in Mexico on the way to a wedding [includes cell phone video of the bullet-riddled, burned-out minivan with charred bodies]:
The three mothers were driving from Bavispe to a wedding in LaBaron, another community in the state of Chihuahua, when their three vehicles loaded with children were attacked by gunfire, causing one of the vehicles to explode in flames, Staddon said. A video posted online shows a burned vehicle riddled with bullet holes.
[Arizona resident Leah] Staddon said the community is home to members of the Mormon Church and members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect. She said the victims of the attack were members of the fundamentalist group.
[…]
She said her brother discovered the bullet-ridden vehicle still smoldering with the charred bodies inside and shot the video as evidence.
Mexican authorities described the victims:
- They said bodies of one woman and four children were found inside a burned Chevrolet Tahoe.
- Three more people, a woman and two children, were found dead in a white Suburban nearby.
- The body of a woman was found in a second white Suburban.
Unless this fundamentalist Mormon community was foolishly getting into the meth manufacturing or other drug business, this slaughter makes no clear sense. As President Trump tweeted about it, his words suggested that the deep state was telling him it was a tragic case of two gangs, rival cartels, shooting it out on the highway and the women and children getting caught in the crossfire. This, however, is unlikely to be true.
Yes, I am saying the President may have been lied to again by the same crew that has decided they will run this country and the elected president, the electoral majority, and the real Constitution, can pound sand. If there was a gun battle on the highway, you would not get three, and only three, vehicles effectively engaged and the occupants all killed. This, based on what we are given, has all the marks of a classic linear ambush, either by a small force in position off the side of the road or by a mobile force overtaking the three vehicles and then pouring bullets into them at point-blank range. …
Is there an achievable solution, something that breaks the power of the Mexican cartels or makes them deeply fearful and circumspect about raising their hand against an American? I can say with some confidence that no one in the deep state, no one in the institutionalized “War on Drugs,” and no one in the commentariat has a feasible solution.**
** The relevant book, one in the line of speculative military fiction by serving or former mid-grade Army officers in the 1990s, is Harold Coyle’s Trial by Fire. If you have not considered the moves and counter-moves in this novel, your plans and prognostications are not serious.
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You spent the last three comments singing to the choir. Most of the opinion of commenters here is not favorable towards the military interventions we have been in over the last couple of decades. Drugs and human trafficking originating in East Asia and traveling through Mexico and the American government relationships with the countries involved has no real comparative with the interventions you have noted. Everything has changed.
I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts!
?
What is allowed at our southern border has done much greater damage than anything going on in the Eastern Hemisphere.
On the demand side – that is really difficult and not sure how that would be done by government. I’m open to suggestions. I agree in principle, I just don’t know how you’d do it largely because it is personal choice and government affecting personal choice isn’t something a government is good at.
The only real way would be extremely harsh sentences for simple possession or evidence of intoxication. I am not sure that is really more cost effective. Also it is completely against the current ethos on both sides of the political isle. We have tried awareness and public messaging that hasn’t really been effective. We currently have diversion programs which may have some impact but only at the margins. Plus there is always the old economic saw that supply will create a demand.
Much more cross aisle support for bombing random foreigners and calling it a success, very true.
People are addicts because they desire to ‘get out of it’ (has the language changed since I was younger?) – it seems the resolution of this is to change that desire to ‘be in it’, with it being real life. That’s the cure for addiction, but it takes some honesty about what real life is and is not – both by the addict and the people around them.
Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy
When it came out, Columbia and the cocaine cartels were the big news, so that was the focus of the book, but the same arguments apply in this situation. The title comes from the determination that the narco cartels posed a “clear and present danger” to the safety and security of the United States, just like the argument made here, only today it seems far more real.
I think the book did a good job of showing how the intelligence community could devise an operation, how it might be carried out, including inevitable pitfalls, and the political sideshow to the whole process.
Read the book. Movie did a disservice to some of the characters, in my opinion.
Above average minds think alike. Green Beret Colonel and U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz wrote on 18 May:
Which Clancy book ended with somebody crashing a plane into the Capitol while Congress was in session? I keep having fantasies about that.
It has the classic appeal of appearing to do something. It may be worthwhile in that if done correctly some really vile people will be introduced to the great beyond. It seems though that our track record with it isn’t 100%. It has no chance of solving the underlying problem. There is a demand so there will be a supply.
I tend to believe there will always be those who desire to self medicate. I see this as a fundamentally intractable problem. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do what we can It just means that we too have to be realistic about our chance of success.
Debt of Honor