Afternoon Reading

Things to note in the world today:

1. Iraq: Sunni militia members in Baghdad revolted Saturday, prompted by the arrest of an Awakenings movement leader by Iraqi forces. The crisis was resolved, but it raises fears that the relationship between the government and Sunni militias-many of which are not being paid as promised-could be strained to the breaking point.

2. A profile of anti-tax nuts, many of whom never met a crazy legal argument they didn't like.

3. The Federal government says GM and Chrysler are not viable, and refuse to offer more aid. Bankruptcy looms for both companies.

4. Mexico faces extreme difficulty putting down the drug cartels, and critics are beginning to call for a change in approach.

5. The women's professional soccer league, version 2.0.

Morning Links

For your reading pleasure:

1. The Treasury Dept. is set to announce new regulatory controls over previously unregulated financial transactions.

2. The Pentagon says in a new report that China is seeking to boost it's military's power and effectiveness. China says we need to chill out. In the meantime, China prepares to force Tibetans to celebrate "Serf Liberation Day", the 60th anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

3. 16 die in a Baghdad bombing.

4. American cities are dealing with an increase in "shantytowns" as the number of homeless rise. Hollywood producers Peter Samuelson wants to give them something better than cardboard boxes to live in.

5. Secretary Clinton bluntly admits that the failed U.S. war on drugs has contributed to rising violence in Mexico.

6. American taxpayers are paying for the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, if in a backhanded way.

7. New study says that most wrongful convictions in Texas stem from witness misidentification.

8. Lisa Falkenberg on Gov. Perry's stimulus fund logic (or lack thereof.)

9. The next American soccer star?

10. A question about student loan forgiveness tops the list at the new "ask the President" website.

More Recommended Reading

End of the day links for your edification:

1. John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, in which Atwood takes something of a meta-view of debt. In essence our profligate ways with our own money reflect our attitudes towards the capital that is our planet, but that the Earth will not be so kind as the present crisis when it's time to pay it back.

2. U.S. officials accuse Pakistan's ISI of supporting Taliban attacks in Afghanistan in a very direct manner, with ISI agents going so far as to strategize with the Taliban about attacks on American forces. Meanwhile, former members of the Taliban say that talks with the Taliban are a possible route to peace, though one says of American forces: "They have a right to ensure that there is no danger to them from Afghanistan...[but] That is the limit of their rights in this country."

3. An aging Dalai Lama concedes that his strategy of engaging the Chinese leadership on Tibet has failed not only to gain traction for Tibetan autonomy, but to slow down the Chinese makeover of the country. China's response to any burgeoning demonstrations of Tibetan independence is met only with repression and violence, but alternative strategies are wanting.

4. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister-delegate, insists that Israel is a "partner for peace" while at the same time he's making backdoor deals to expand Israeli settlements in a particular part of the West Bank, a move that the U.S. government has long opposed as an impediment to peace.

5. In an op-ed for the WSJ, three former Presidents of Latin American countries argue that the "war on drugs" is a dismal failure, and it's time for a new course of action.

The Beam in our Own Eye

This article gets to the heart of the hypocrisy that defines our relationship with Mexico; hysteria over the possibility that any American might be killed as a result of the drug war, and an unwillingness to take any responsibility for our part in Mexico's troubles:

Mexico’s economy is being dragged down by the recession to the north. American addicts have turned Mexico into a drug superhighway, and its police and soldiers are under assault from American guns. Nafta promised 15 years ago that Mexican trucks would be allowed on American roads, but Congress said they were unsafe.

[...]

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives in Mexico on Wednesday for what will be the first in a parade of visits by top administration officials, including President Obama himself next month, to try to head off a major foreign policy crisis close to home. They will find a country mired in a deepening slump, miffed by signs of protectionism in its largest trading partner, and torn apart by a drug war for which many in Mexico blame customers in the United States.

There is plenty of angst on the other side as well. Many American communities are worried about drug violence spilling over the border, and about Mexican immigrants taking scarce jobs. That is forcing the Obama administration, already managing two wars and a deep recession, to fashion a new Mexico policy earlier than it might have wished.

[...]

Some in the administration have suggested that the Mexican government is not in control of all of its territory, even as other officials praise President Felipe Calderón’s resolve to fight the drug trade. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urged and then backed away from reinstituting a ban on sales of assault rifles, which are fueling the drug violence.

Mr. Obama acknowledged contingency plans to deploy troops to the border if too much of the violence spilled over into the United States, but he said almost in the same breath that no such deployment was imminent.

“I think it’s unacceptable if you’ve got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens,” Mr. Obama told reporters when asked if he might deploy troops. “I think if one U.S. citizen is killed because of foreign nationals who are engaging in violent crime, that’s enough of a concern to do something about it.”

The bloody drug war, which has caused 7,000 deaths in 16 months, has become the principal sore point between the countries. Although addiction rates among Mexicans are on the rise, the vast majority of the drugs flowing through Mexico will be sniffed, smoked or injected by Americans. On top of that, 90 percent of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels originated in the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

So Obama is forced to answer questions about deploying troops to the border with Mexico (troops that Texas law enforcement officials don't even want) even as Mexican deaths in drug related violence outnumber American deaths by about 7,000 to 200, as Americans continue to buy drugs from Mexican cartels, and as gun sellers sell weapons to those same cartels at a tidy profit. Can anyone explain why it isn't Mexico that's considering sending troops to the border with us?

UPDATE: The response to rising violence in Mexico will be, of course, another offensive in the endless war on drugs.

U.S. Arms Dealers Arm Mexican Drug Cartels

There is a thriving trade between Mexico and the United States: they send us drugs, we send them guns. And if you've been reading us for awhile you realize that yes, we've written about this before. From today's article:

Smugglers routinely enlist Americans with clean criminal records to buy two or three rifles at a time, often from different shops, then transport them across the border in cars and trucks, often secreting them in door panels or under the hood, law enforcement officials here say. Some of the smuggled weapons are also bought from private individuals at gun shows, and the law requires no notification of the authorities in those cases.

“We can move against the most outrageous purveyors of arms to Mexico, but the characteristic of the arms trade is it’s a ‘parade of ants’ — it’s not any one big dealer, it’s lots of individuals,” said Arizona’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, who is prosecuting Mr. Iknadosian. “That makes it very hard to detect because it’s often below the radar.”

[...]

The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes. But A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico come from dealers north of the border.

In 2007, the firearms agency traced 2,400 weapons seized in Mexico back to dealers in the United States, and 1,800 of those came from dealers operating in the four states along the border, with Texas first, followed by California, Arizona and New Mexico.

I'm for the legal buying and selling of guns. I accept that as a society we've made a decision about the type of weapons we permit gun owners to have, and the consequences that may follow as a result. I just wonder if most people realize that one of those consequences is serving as the equivalent of a Mogadishu arms bazaar to Mexican drug cartels.

Futility

We're fighting the war on drugs, but the only people getting killed are south of the border. 

The Neverending War

On the failures of the drug war:

On June 17, America's longest-running war reached another milestone -- 37 years and counting, with no end in sight. Hardly anyone noticed. Neither of the leading presidential candidates mentioned the struggle that has cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and countless American lives. A Senate hearing was held to mark the anniversary, but hardly anyone came.

A few weeks later, there was a major breakthrough in the war when three hostages -- the longest-held U.S. captives in the world at more than five years -- were freed in a dramatic military rescue. But few Americans had ever even heard of Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell or Thomas Howes or knew that when they were captured by guerrillas in Colombia, they had been fighting on the front lines of the U.S. war on drugs.

Declared by then-president Richard M. Nixon in 1971, the drug war no longer has the glitter it once had. Two decades ago, illicit imports of cocaine, heroin and marijuana and their use by Americans topped the list of public concerns in nationwide surveys at 22 percent. In January, a Pew Research Center poll found that only 1 percent of the population considered drugs and alcohol the most important problem facing the country.

...as the Colombia hostage story illustrates, the fight against illicit drugs goes on, and it is not without peril.

Nor is it without domestic consequences, as experts testified at last summer's poorly-attended hearing, chaired by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). About "500,000 persons are locked up for drug offenses in any one day" in this country, said Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland's criminology department. John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America noted that the annual economic costs of illicit drugs have grown significantly over the past 15 years; in a 2004 study, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) put the figure at $181 billion.

When he began the war on drugs, Nixon called it an "emergency response to a national problem which we intend to control" within five years. Demand, he said, was the engine that drove the industry and "when drug traffic in narcotics is no longer profitable, the traffic will cease." By the mid-1980s, the explosive mixture of crack cocaine and crime had led to tough mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug offenders and Ronald Reagan had labeled it a national security problem. With narcotics providing massive amounts of income to the Taliban in Afghanistan, FARC guerrillas in Colombia and other extremist groups around the world, President Bush has defined the drug trade as a major part of the terrorist threat.

But the war has arguably had little discernible effect on either supply or demand. At latest count, as Webb noted last summer, illegal drug flows are four times more valuable than global exports of beer and wine -- even though the street price of both cocaine and heroin are 80 percent lower than in the 1980s. Illicit drug use has remained relatively constant, involving about 8 percent of the U.S. population, since the beginning of this decade.

The analogy of a war isn't apt, as there really is no victory possible against this sort of illegal activity; the drug "war" is more like a disease that can't be cured but can perhaps be regulated. But what's truly discouraging is that for the billions spent, the millions imprisoned and an untold number killed, we really are no nearer to any measure of success than we were in 1971. We've experienced various phases in the war as various drugs have gained or lost popularity, but have yet to make any major inroads against the ever shifting panorama of drug lords and cartels that each pop up in the wake of the destruction of another. Worse yet, are the unanticipated consequences of our war on drugs:

The presidential nominees -- Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama -- have said little about the drug war. But there are signs on the horizon that it may regain its place as a first-tier issue. The warnings come from Mexico, where President Felipe Calderón's government is engaged in a fierce battle against violent, homegrown drug cartels that has already cost thousands of lives. It does not take a geography major to understand the implications for the United States if this war gets out of hand.

Indeed it does not, and the Houston Chronicle explains in more detail exactly how the drug war in northern Mexico is spilling over into Texas:

Frustrated by a crackdown on South Texas drug smuggling routes, the Mexican Gulf Cartel is stockpiling high-powered weapons and recruiting local gang members on both sides of the border to prepare for possible confrontations with U.S. law enforcement, according to an FBI intelligence report.

The regional leader of the cartel's enforcer group, the Zetas, Jaime "El Hummer" Gonzalez Duran ordered dozens of reinforcements to Reynosa, Mexico, across the river from McAllen, the report said.

"These replacements are believed to be armed with assault rifles, bulletproof vests and grenades and are occupying safe houses throughout the McAllen area," the report obtained by The McAllen Monitor said.

The Monitor reported in today's editions that the local FBI office refused to comment on the report.

Erik Vasys, an FBI spokesman in San Antonio, refused to discuss the details of the report but told The Associated Press "we acknowledge the Zetas are a significant problem in Mexico and they have the potential to pose a significant problem to law enforcement on this side of the border."

There isn't an institutional impetus for vast drug cartels in the United States, but it's all too easy for them to extend their tendrils of influence across the border of Mexico. The cartels, never known for their discretion (hundreds of civilians have died this year in Mexico at the hands of the cartels) are nothing if not prickly when it comes to defending their drug trade, and such moves come despite a recent effort by Mexico's President to use federal troops to crack down on the cartels. Now, almost forty years into the drug war, did anyone imagine that the cartels would be stockpiling weapons in our country in preparation for battles with our law enforcement agencies? If this is a war, we're in retreat.

2,000 Guns

That's how many weapons are being illegally smuggled into Mexico for use by the drug cartels. Where are they coming from? Why, the U.S. of course:

The high-powered guns used in both incidents on the evening of Sept. 24 undoubtedly came from the United States, say police here, who estimate that 100 percent of drug-related killings are committed with smuggled U.S. weapons.

The guns pass into Mexico through the "ant trail," the nickname for the steady stream of people who each slip two or three weapons across the border every day. The "ants" -- along with larger smuggling operations -- are feeding a rapidly expanding arms race between Mexican drug cartels.

The U.S. weapons -- as many as 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study -- are crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode.

Corrupt customs officials help smuggle weapons into Mexico, earning as much as $1 million for large shipments, police here say. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.

...law enforcement officers on both sides of the border have never seen anything like the flood of guns now surging into Mexico. The increase has been stoked by the cartel war and by the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, William Newell, a special agent in charge of the ATF's Phoenix office, said in an interview.

Arizona and Texas have become a "gunrunner's paradise," according to Garen Wintemute, a professor at the University of California at Davis who published a study on gun buying in the Southwest. Licensed dealers must conduct background checks, but unlicensed sellers can sell "personal collections" at weekend gun shows without background checks.

Laws on personal collections were established to allow people such as the widows of avid gun collectors to make sales without having to go through an elaborate licensing procedure. But unscrupulous sellers and buyers have taken advantage of the system, Newell said, setting up phony personal collections booths and making quick sales that are difficult to trace.

"It can take less than a minute," said Wintemute, who has watched unlicensed dealers wearing sandwich boards at gun shows and piling weapons for sale into baby carriages.

If you don't have a problem with the U.S. being the number 1 source for guns in a drug war killing hundreds a month, then there's something wrong with you. Whatever your beliefs about the Second Amendment may be, I'm pretty sure the Framers didn't have in mind that it would be used as a justification for gun dealers to enrich themselves by supplying weapons to all sides in what is practically a civil war. But we can't energize Congress to change gun laws after American students are mowed down in classrooms, so I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath for them to express a small amount of concern over the number of Mexicans being killed by our guns.

Desperate Americans turn to Mexico for dental care

Wow, who would have thought that Americans could get better health care in Mexico?

"EL PASO, United States (AFP) - With aching teeth and a need to cut expenses, throngs of Americans are marching into neighboring Mexico for dental care, and saving hundreds to thousands of dollars in the bargain."

I really want to quote this whole article because it's just so ridiculous the lengths people have to go to in order to get good dental care. It's really an indictment of the American health care system. I suppose if you're a libertarian this serves as an argument for globalization of the economy, but I still think it's a damn shame the Americans, members of the most powerful and still the richest nation on Earth, should have to turn for health care to a nation we consider third-world!

Well, at least Americans have that option. British people sometimes have to resort to pulling their own teeth!