Mexico's Continual Implosion

Today's WSJ ran a frightful article, "Mexico Under Siege," by Nicholas Casey on the latest narco-terror conditions plaguing Mexico's wealthiest city, Monterrey, and threatening the near-term political and economic stability of the Mexican state. This is nothing new conceptually, yet with each passing day, Mexico takes one step closer to totally collapse and collapse and failure. Conditions on the ground level have deteriorated to the point where residents are communicating to the government via newspaper advertising!

"Residents opened their newspapers Wednesday morning to find the ads taken out by Mexican business leaders, begging the government to send more military into the city. "Enough already," said the notice that ran in national and local papers, criticizing what it said was a slow response of police against "criminal bands that in every act look to establish a new boundary of terror."

The Mexican government is either impotent, deaf, or incapable of dealing with the cartel pandemic. Taking out a newspaper ad is akin to sending smoke signals of distress in the days western frontier yore, it doesn't get an flipping' worse. Yet, policy makers in Washington, DC, and leading media analysts seem uninterested in these alarming trends at best and woefully ignorant at worst. Are they distracting, unaware, or just playing the role of the coy ostrich and hoping that embedding your head in the sand will to the problem magically evaporating. Today, we silently celebrated the withdrawal of our last combat brigade from Iraq, are floundering in a confused and ill-defined mission in Afghanistan, and are expressing total indifference to Iran's upcoming membership in the nuclear. All of the aforementioned, while important, is also half-a-globe away. The only news we regularly read about Mexico is how pissed off certain liberals and left-wing Mexicans are about Arizona's legislative experiment in legitimate border control and sovereignty preservation. (Mixed feelings on the Arizona law itself, but a deep appreciation for the spirit driving it on this end) It boggles the mind given what is at stake should Mexico descend into a state paralyzed anarchy, especially given the porous nature of the United States-Mexico border, the size of legitimate trade and commercial activity ob both sides of the border, and the potential for extensive spill-over into the United States proper should things go any further south, south of the border. When it comes to governmental authority and respect for the rule of law, here's what the drug cartels think.

"The body of Edelmiro Cavazos, mayor of the Monterrey suburb of Santiago, was found beside a highway. Mr. Cavazos had been abducted Sunday night, the latest in a string of attacks against politicians in Mexico's north."

These cartel goons are afraid of nothing. Whacking government officials like they are playing Grand Theft Auto with no sense of recourse is unreal. Does Calderon's authority not extend beyond the walls of the presidential residence? How long before madness like that infiltrates El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix, and San Diego? It has been roughly a century since the United States had to dispatch General Pershing to deal with Pancho Villa's cross-border incursions. As much as history repeats itself on some levels, the stakes are much different should we start playing games of cat-and-mouse with well-financed and utterly ruthless drug cartels who know no limits, decency, or honor. If the implications weren't so dire and threat so real, the foundation of this tragedy would actually be fascinating to watch and follow.

Mexico on the brink?

Tracy Wilkinson of the Los Angeles has a rather detailed and thoroughly disturbing article about how emboldened the drug cartels have become in  Northern Mexico.

"In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico's organized criminals."

Is this not reminiscent of scenes out of Mad Max or The Road Warrior on some level? Mind you this isn't some post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland; it is only miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Could you imagine a world where well-armed highway gangs are successfully going to toe-to-toe with large urban American police forces, or even the United States military without being utterly obliterated? For all of its virtue and splendor, Mexico remains a rather large experiment in Latin American dysfunction. The werewolf is concerned that if these problems aren't addressed and contained in short order, this problem will escalate into a severely malignant tumor along our border with Mexico with wide a wide ranging spectrum of negative repercussions. 

Towns being abandoned under order of death for the inhabitants, honest cops rarer than virgins in whorehouses, an impotent government hanging on by mere threads, with honest people terrorized and lives treated as mere pawns in the vicious games played by the drug cartels for profitable pipelines is becoming the norm in Mexico. This isn't the middle ages or Somalia, this is the Northern Hemisphere and the doorstep to the United States of America. Mexico City's claim to sovereignty grows weaker with each passing day. When will America step up -it will have to at some point- as we can't play the ostrich forever,  and find a General Pershing for the modern era (note it has been almost a century since his infamous foray's against Poncho Villa, who says history isn't cyclical?) and unleash a Marine Expeditionary Force on the repulsive cartels and put an put an end to their trade in misery, blood, and brutality? It's the clear the Mexicans are incapable of handling their own internal security, alas, this burden, like so many others will fall on our shoulders.

Along with waging a violent and brutal war on the cartels, -which honor and justice demand - what changes need to be wrought on this side of the border to undermine these cartels? Is legalization of hard drugs - which appeals to the werewolf's inner-libertarian, yet sits grotesquely uneasy with his moral compass and sense of right, a realistic solution? Whatever the US plan is, it needs to be multi-pronged, fast, a vicious. If this includes adjusting the demand in the states with regulation and legalization regime, along with destroying supply, (napalming cocoa fields), along with showing no mercy to the Cartels as we hunt them down, so be it. However, our chronic impotence on this issue speak to how poorly our society has evolved from days of yore. Like all festering wounds, this must be treating before gangrene sets in and limbs need to be amputated.

How to help Haiti: End Aid

The Wall Street Journal's Brett Stephens has a great op-ed about how to help Haiti rebuild following the end of the humanitarian aid episode.

"A better approach recognizes the real humanity of Haitians by treating them—once the immediate and essential tasks of rescue are over—as people capable of making responsible choices. Haiti has some of the weakest property protections in the world, as well as some of the most burdensome business regulations. In 2007, it received 10 times as much in aid ($701 million) as it did in foreign investment.

Reversing those figures is a task for Haitians alone, which the outside world can help by desisting from trying to kill them with kindness. Anything short of that and the hell that has now been visited on this sad country will come to seem like merely its first circle."

The question is will "western white guilt" trump the imperative to enact tough, but meaningful reforms that may lead to tangible results. Likely.

Haiti has been a basket-case for generations, perhaps the best thing the United States can do to help Haiti stabilize is lift all import-export tariffs for the next five years on goods from Haiti and perhaps provide low-interest loans to entrepreneurs whom want to take a stab at trying to create something more meaningful than another aid dependent kleptocracy floating on a legacy of anarchy. Wishful thinking.

Haiti: Thinking about tomorrow & Avoiding mission creep.

Haiti is broken. It is the most pathetic example of humanity at work on the face of this globe. Statelessness, confusion, anarchy, and emptiness fail to adequately capture Haiti's prospects at the moment. As the 21st century dawns, the world looks to Haiti to understand the rawest form of Hobbes' "state of nature". It is not pretty. The werewolf firmly supports the humanitarian relief being spearheaded by the United States at the moment. However, this relief is not enduring, and eventually it will have to end. Herein lies the problem. What the hell happens next?

The most recent Haitian government, under President Perval, has proven it is more useless than a flaccid penis on a eunuch since last week's devastation. Any semblance of government was totally wiped out and is nowhere to be found. Pathetic, but telling. One of Haiti's former dictator's, Baby Doc Duvalier, living a pedestrian life in exile, has pledged money that isn't his to aid relief efforts, and there are even grumblings about a comeback. Hopefully any chatter about bringing the criminal Aristide back from his exile in South Africa ends before the thought is complete. Here lies a major problem for tomorrow's Haiti. There is no credible source of domestic governance.

The werewolf chalks this up to several things. Firstly, Haiti has such a broken sense of civil society, that without a violent cult-like strongman, a la Papa Doc, there is no civil respect for central authority(This is NOT an endorsement of Papa Doc, just an observation). Secondly, it seemed as if Haiti's most recent governments have outsourced most of their management and governing duties to NGO's and the UN. That is why they vanished when the quake struck. They were virtually invisible to begin with. Herein lies the real problem, Haiti as it recently/currently exists, is a slave to both NGO's and the UN. There is an ugly downside to do-gooderism of those who want to help the world's blighted people. You make them dependent and strip them of their sense of self. As long as these forces are present, Haiti can never make a stab at being a state again (Perhaps it shouldn't, but what then?). The werewolf doesn't want the dedicated soldiers of the 82nd Airborne or the Marine Expeditionary Force, currently trying to stabilize Haiti, to be permanent facets of Haiti's near-term future. What's the solution? It is a really ugly picture.

The Europeans, the French in particular, have the temerity to accuse the American's of trying to occupy Haiti and create a colony. Up yours, jerks! Where are your carriers and massive aid flotillas? That's right, you wouldn't dare sully your uniforms and get your hands dirty unless their was some direct benefit to you. The French still suck. Here's the latest insincere apology over that ridiculous flap. This post will ignore the vile commentary from Venezuela's ignoramus-in-chief, Hugo Chavez.

Back to the point, there are endless op-eds, articles, and musings in all media about what to do with Haiti. The werewolf doesn't know. He's just an unemployed MBA looking for purpose. He fears that America will suffer from "mission creep." If it isn't careful, it may find itself stuck with Haiti as a new, and unwarranted, appendage. The werewolf isn't comfortable with nation-building, and believes that America lacks the will to do it right(despite having the resources), should it elect to try, and therefore nation-building should be avoided. However, making Haiti a permanent ward of the NGO's and the UN smacks of colonialism in the worst hands, and doing nothing may create a barbaric vacuum of anything decent a few hundred miles from our shoreline(back to the status quo?). It's a lose-lose. The question remains, where and when, is it acceptable to cut losses as it relates to Haiti?

The werewolf is curious what the few readers out there actually think.

Disaster Cubed: Haiti's Plight.

The magnitude of yesterday's devastating earthquake in Haiti is becoming clear. The cataclysmic scale is heart retching and disturbing. Drudgereport estimates nearly 500,000 dead. Here's the latest from the Associated Press. Every resource that can be spared from the United States, should be directed to helping the Haitian's regroup. Herbert Gold wrote a great book, Haiti: The Best Nightmare on Earth, that paints a profound portrait of Haiti's permanent societal and civil dysfunction. After yesterday's calamity, Haiti may have just become the most squalid, miserable, portion of the earth that hosts human habitation. Here's a great link on how to help via The Anchoress. If you're a person of faith, some prayers couldn't hurt either. Anyhow, godspeed to the Haitian's in recovering from this catastrophe.

Mexico's plight.

In a thoroughly disturbing article about the sorry state of Mexico, Phillip Caputo writes, "I have just been in Juárez and am relieved to not be going back to that industrialized border city—utterly charmless in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Juárez’s main product now is the corpse. Last year, drug-related violence there claimed more than 1,600 lives, and the toll for the first nine months of this year soared beyond 1,800, and mounts daily. That makes Juárez, population 1.5 million, the most violent city in the world. Two lines of graffiti summed up a place where not only law and order but civilization itself has broken down: Mi ciudad pide clemencia en su dementia (“My city asks for mercy in its madness”), and Mi ciudad es un negro lamento un aullido infinito (“My city is a black lament, an eternal howl”)." Bleak.

Given that the United States shares over one-thousand miles of border with Mexico, a long mutually linked history, a series of important trade relationships, and has absorbed tens of millions of Mexicans, both legal and illegal, looking for hope, opportunity, and redemption, you'd think that this story would have some serious traction and be getting the attention of national policy makers across the board. I would be shocked if this story doesn't become part of the national dialog in the next several months. There's too much at stake for this story to dither on the vines of neglect.

Scylla and Charybdis for the modern age.

On the Knife's Edge: Yemen's Instability and the Threat to American Interests | Center for a New American Security

This is an interesting little piece from the Center for a New American Security on Yemen's gloomy prospects as a state. I have long been fascinated by failed states and studied them extensively as an undergraduate. It's no secret that Somalia is the crown jewel of failed state examples. Depending on how one defines a failed state, examples can also include the Democratic People's Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Yugoslavia(it's fragments tell that story), Chad, Zimbabwe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Plenty of others could qualify based on adjusted metrics.

Failed states also present a serious security conundrum for the United States. Being a skeptic of nation building projects and their implications, yet, a closet humanitarian, who also believes in the preemptive use of force when appropriate, the werewolf struggles with how to best frame addressing failed states from a security perspective. There is no question that failed states can serve as safe havens for our enemies and also can send out destabilizing shock waves to their neighbors, complicating anything and everything. Given that Somalia has devolved into a cesspool of piracy, terrorism, gangsterism, and anarchy, and that Yemen and Somalia share several distinctive internal traits, it would be terrifying to think of the implications of of having two failed states straddling the gates to the Red Sea. It would literally create a modern day "Scylla and Charybdis" for maritime commerce.