Ah, the futility of the endless “War on Drugs.” The more it fails, the more it demands ramped up measures approximating genuine war.
And naturally (as Simon and I have pointed out ad nauseam), the more the “warriors” try to clamp down on the drug flow one place, the more it spreads to others. The latest news is that the United States is now expanding its drug war operations to Africa:
The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.
In both regions, American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling — like Mexico and Spain — have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.
The aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.
“We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” said Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”
It’s all so predictable that I’d find it almost dull if it weren’t being done with taxpayer dollars. What worries me is that they might not care that the drug war is futile. As the real wars wind down, the drug war may be seen as a acceptable way to keep military appropriations flowing. (Hence the degradation of the proud Marine Corps into an unconstitutional police force.)
What is happening is not funny, but I was amused by one remark in today’s story:
Some specialists have expressed skepticism about the approach. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin America and counternarcotics, said that what had happened in West Africa over the past few years was the latest example of the “Whac-A-Mole” problem, in which making trafficking more difficult in one place simply shifts it to another.
“As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are incredibly weak — I don’t care how much vetting they do,” Professor Bagley said. “And there is always blowback to this. You start killing people in foreign countries — whether criminals or not — and there is going to be fallout.”
Reminds me of the lefties’ attempts to combat “sprawl.” Efforts to stop development in one county only ensure that it will happen right along the closest border in the next. The difference, of course, is that elite liberal public policy planners tend to be pointy-headed intellectuals who are not grounded in reality or common sense and thus cannot be expected to understand the “Whac-a-Mole” dynamic.
But when I see people who know better engaging in such silly antics, I find myself wondering whether they do so deliberately.
Comments
7 responses to “Playing “Whac-a-Mole” with tax dollars”
The mistake you’re making is assuming “lefties” aren’t the ones who came up with this. Any general officer has to be confirmed by the Senate. And the DoD bureaucrats are SEIU members in good standing.
SDN,
The Drug War is not lefties any more. It is NWO.
http://classicalvalues.com/2011/11/why-we-must-not-end-prohibition/
Go to Narco News – links above – and read the whole thing. It will change your understanding of the way the world works.
They are NOT trying to stop drugs. They are instrumental in spreading them.
Mike Ruppert – The CIA and Drug Running
Watch the question that starts about 1:17 into the video. In answer Mike explains the whole premise of the Drug War and who is behind it. The Bankers. The NWO bankers. Fitts says the same thing from a different perspective.
Eric – have your friend who studies economics look into it. It is a mind blower. Voodoo in a sense.
Ruppert may be right but I don’t consider him a reliable source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruppert
I don’t consider him correct about everything he says. But if you watch the movie I linked he has LOTS of public sources to back up his points.
You will note that none of the criticism of him deals with his Drug War allegations. Funny that.
But OK. Here is a 30 year old source:
The Politics Of Heroin in South East Asia.
Another:
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press – Alexander Cockburn
Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America
The most convincing source so far is Hillary Clinton, who admitted that we can’t end the drug war because “there’s too much money in it!”
Well. If you wanted to keep an open secret the very best way to do it is to accuse those who trumpet the secret as being “conspiracy theorists”. That insures that the 90% will never look into the claims of the 10%. And thus the secret is kept. You might also want to manufacture crimes of moral turpitude. Easy enough. It is done every day in divorce cases.
Open secrets – Drug War money flows are officially accounted at $1 trillion a year. That money is going somewhere. Funny that it is not officially tracked. Given all the tracking controls in place world wide.
“The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.” – William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995
Not too long after making that statement he died in a boating accident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Colby
Note that the quote above was not important enough to make the wiki.