http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-03-11.asp

Hornberger’s Blog
Wednesday, March 11, 2009


The Drug War: An Old Mission for the Pentagon
by Jacob G. Hornberger

As the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the Pentagon was desperately in search of a
mission. Given the demise of the Soviet Union, which had been the excuse for an
ever-growing military-industrial complex for decades, the talk of a “peace dividend”
was in the air. “What do we need all that military spending for if the communist
threat is now nonexistent?” people were asking.

Wait a minute, cried the Pentagon. We can still find something to do. Just don’t cut
our budget. Among the things they proposed was to help wage the “war on drugs.”
Of course, that was long before U.S. foreign policy produced the terrorist blowback
that resulted in the “war on terrorism” and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given the decreasing enthusiasm for the perpetual war on terrorism and the 6-year
and 7-year occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan among the American people, the
Pentagon is now returning to the old mission that it spoke about soon after the
demise of the Berlin Wall. That would be the drug war.

As most everyone knows, the drug war has produced untold violence on the Mexican
side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Thousands of people, including both government
officials and private individuals, are being killed in an all-out war between the drug
cartels and Mexican law-enforcement officials. The violence has gotten so bad that it
is threatening to spill over into the United States.

Not surprisingly, the crisis is causing U.S. officials, especially those in the Pentagon, to
call for U.S. intervention to fix the problem. “The drug cartels are a threat to national
security,” U.S. officials are exclaiming. Just recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, flew to Mexico to discuss rushing military assistance to
Mexico. “We have a sense of urgency about this, ” he said.

Meanwhile, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a Republican, has jumped on the crisis
bandwagon by calling on President Obama to send U.S. troops to the border,
perhaps in the hope that they’ll wage the war on drugs in the way they’ve waged the
war on terrorism — by busting people’s doors down without warrants, confiscating
guns, incarcerating people without due process and trial, and maybe even torturing
them into talking about pending drug deals.

Here is how the system works. U.S. government policy produces the conditions for a
crisis, which then is used as the excuse for military intervention, which means ever-
growing budgets for government officials.

For years, the U.S. government has been exhorting the Mexican government to ramp
up the drug war, despite warnings from libertarians and others that doing so would
only increase the level of violence.

Now that the Mexican government has complied with U.S. wishes, producing the
predictable results, the U.S. government, especially the Pentagon, is now responding
in the predictable way — by calling for military intervention, which means ever-
increasing budgets for you-know-who.

What’s the 35-year-old drug war really all about? It’s about money and power. Let’s
face it: These people are not stupid enough to believe that doing the same thing
they’ve done for 35 years is going to produce a different result. The fact is that there
are lots of people making big money from the drug war. And no, it’s not just the
drug dealers and corrupt Mexican government officials. It’s also corrupt federal,
state, and local officials on the U.S. side of the border.

First and foremost are the bribes, especially to law-enforcement people along the
border who are paid big money to look the other way. But there is also the
“legitimate” money that people make from the drug war — the nice salaries paid to
judges, prosecutors, sheriffs, marshals, clerks, and staffs. And, of course, let’s not
forget the budgets for the military and the military-industrial complex.

Oh, I forget to mention the other big money that is being made from the drug war —
the asset-forfeiture crowd. Those are the public officials whose budgets have soared
from the money they have confiscated and stolen from countless people, in the name
of the war on drugs. Just ask African-Americans who have had the misfortune of
traveling through Tenaha, Texas. They’ve had thousands of dollars taken from them
by the cops, without any charges ever being filed against them. What better example
of highway robbery than that?

Don’t count on public officials to willingly bring an end to the war on drugs. Like
those drug cartels they’re fighting, they’re benefitting too much from it, in terms of
bribes, salaries, budgets, and power. The drug-war idiocy will come to an end only
when the American people finally declare that enough is enough and demand that
the drug war be ended, immediately.


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