On invading Mexico

Authorizing the use of American military force in Mexico is insane.

Members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel posting selfies.

We’ve got excellent articles on the boil for you this week, including some by new writers—you’ll love them. But before launching into this week of excellent reading, we’ll look at an issue that’s greatly vexing me but is, strangely, barely in the news.

I’ve included a few questions along the way because I’m curious to know what you think. It’s not a quiz. In some cases, I haven’t yet made up my own mind. I’m just genuinely wondering what you make of this.

Feel free, as always, to elaborate on your replies in the comment section.

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I appreciate that Americans are transfixed by the meltdown of Silicon Valley Bank. But when senior representatives of one of the US’s major political parties propose to invade Mexico, it should at least make us blink. It’s so preposterous that I can scarcely write the words “invade Mexico” without laughing, but they really are threatening to do it. And while they don’t have the power to do this without the Biden Administration’s cooperation, the GOP is not so powerless that their proposals may be safely ignored. If nothing else, the rest of the world heard what they said, which certainly doesn’t help us to make our case against the invasion of Ukraine.

I would have thought these threats would be on the front page of every newspaper and magazine in America. Shouldn’t they be? Shouldn’t this be giving rise to controversy, to furious debate? Or have we collectively decided to ignore everything the GOP says on the grounds that they can’t possibly be serious and it must be just another meaningless sop to their insatiable base?

If so, I think that’s a mistake. This isn’t just Tucker Carlson; these are members of Congress. The GOP still has a lot of power. They seem very serious about wanting to use it to start a war with Mexico. And that’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.

Question 1: Have you heard about this?

Question 2: Where do you live?

Here’s what the New York Times has written about this story. (Not one single word.)

The Washington Post is doing a bit better: Mexico’s president rebukes GOP push to use US military against cartels:

“We are not going to allow any foreign government to intervene and much less foreign armed forces to intervene in our territory,” López Obrador said at a news conference, adding that he would ask Americans of Mexican and Hispanic origin not to vote for Republicans if their “aggression” continued. …

The verbal clash with GOP officials followed the kidnapping of four US citizens last week, two of whom were killed. (On Thursday, Mexican authorities discovered five zip-tied men and an apology note, purportedly from a Gulf Cartel faction that wanted to hand over the alleged perpetrators.) …

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) this week again urged the Biden administration to initiate military action against cartels. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) demanded that US forces “destroy drug labs,” though he added that the military should not forcibly enter Mexico.

But the final sentence above is inaccurate—wildly so. He most certainly did say the US military should forcibly enter Mexico. It wasn’t ambiguous, either.

The Post supports this claim by linking to the video of his joint press conference with Senator John Kennedy last Wednesday. I’ve watched it carefully, several times. He said the US military should forcibly enter Mexico. He said it plainly and he said it several times. He later said it again on Fox. I suppose it’s possible that he’s since recanted and retracted his comments, but I can find no record of it. Can you?

Let me show you exactly what he said. Here’s the video in question:

Graham and Kennedy have a two-part plan. First, they want to designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, which, Graham notes, is “the highest designation you can give a criminal enterprise that’s not a nation-state.” This would allow the US to prosecute the Chinese companies that provide precursor chemicals to the cartels on charges of providing material support to terrorists.

I’m not opposed, but I’m genuinely unsure whether there’s a good case to be made for doing this. My reservation is that “Foreign Terrorist Organization” has a specific meaning. Section 212(a)(3)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines “terrorist activity” to mean an unlawful activity involving the following:

(I) The highjacking or sabotage of any conveyance (including an aircraft, vessel, or vehicle).

(II) The seizing or detaining, and threatening to kill, injure, or continue to detain, another individual in order to compel a third person (including a governmental organization) to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the individual seized or detained.

(III) A violent attack upon an internationally protected person (as defined in section 1116(b)(4) of title 18, United States Code) or upon the liberty of such a person.

(IV) An assassination.

(V) The use of any--

(a) biological agent, chemical agent, or nuclear weapon or device, or

(b) explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device (other than for mere personal monetary gain), with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property.

(VI) A threat, attempt, or conspiracy to do any of the foregoing.

Fentanyl could certainly be seen as “a chemical agent” or a “dangerous device.” But terrorism just isn’t the same thing as drug-smuggling or organized crime, and I’m dubious of basing legislation on a metaphor.¹

Nor am I persuaded it will have the effect Graham believes it will. As of 2020, the DEA believed that China, not Mexico, was the main source of fentanyl trafficked into the United States. Mexico was number two. India was catching up quickly. Should we expand the definition of an FTO to include the Chinese triads, too? If not, why not?

The DEA noted that in 2019, in response to US pressure, China placed strict controls on all forms of fentanyl. What happened? Manufacturers promptly began shifting production to India. The DEA concludes:

The flow of fentanyl to the United States in the near future will probably continue to be diversified. The emergence of India as a precursor chemical and fentanyl supplier as well as China’s newly implemented regulations have significant ramifications for how TCO’s [Transnational Criminal Organizations] fentanyl and fentanyl precursor chemical supply chains will operate. ...

Fentanyl production and precursor chemical sourcing may also expand beyond the currently identified countries as fentanyl lacks the geographic source boundaries of heroin and cocaine as these must be produced from plant-based materials.

It seems to me that given the enormous amount of money to be made and the ease of transporting fentanyl—you can pretty much send enough to get all of Los Angeles high in an airmail envelope—prosecuting Chinese companies that provide precursor chemicals will have all the effect of squirting a water pistol at a forest fire.

So for now, I file this part of the proposal under, “Sounds okay, but won’t work.”

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Question 3: What do you think of this part of the proposal? (Just this first part.)

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Related: Here’s a well-reported article from the Washington Post’s excellent “Cartel” series: Inside the daunting hunt for the ingredients of fentanyl and meth:

Even state-of-the-art ports can search only a small fraction of the containers arriving each day. A further complication: Some of the chemicals used in meth or fentanyl are “dual-use”: They are needed to make everyday goods such as cheese, soap and epilepsy medication. “You can’t stop this stuff, otherwise you’d seriously disrupt the global economy,” said Bryce Pardo, who until recently was the associate director of the Drug Policy Research Center at the Rand Corp.

Crime groups play a cat-and-mouse game with regulators. When authorities put chemicals on watch lists, subjecting them to more scrutiny, traffickers combine legally available substances — “pre-precursors” — to make similar compounds. “You can’t control [all the chemicals] because they have licit uses, like in pharmaceuticals,” said Sofía Díaz Menció, the project coordinator in Mexico for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “And organized crime, in any case, will find substitutes.” …

… The sudden change may indicate that traffickers have switched to other precursors since 4-AP was put on Mexico’s watch list last year. “The more substances you put under control, the more traffickers use very skilled chemical engineers to find new substitutes,” said one U.N. official, who was not authorized to comment on the record.²

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Back to Graham’s press conference. He rehearses the grim statistics on fentanyl poisoning:

What drives this [plan]? It’s fentanyl. It has been a game changer. More people died in the United States from fentanyl poisoning than car wrecks and gun violence combined. Fentanyl is becoming the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45. Two hundred Americans die every day due to fentanyl overdoses. Fentanyl overdoses cause the equivalent of a new September 11th every two weeks.

This is largely true and entirely horrifying. The CDC says that 150 people die daily from opiate overdoses, of which fentanyl overdoses are a sharply rising proportion. Either way, it’s catastrophic. I understand why Graham feels under pressure to do something.

But this?

I think John and I believe that if there were an ISIS or Al Qaeda cell in Mexico that lobbed a rocket into Texas, we’d wipe ‘em off the planet. They’re doing that times thousands and our response is inadequate. …

Now, I don’t know if it’s a lack of will, on behalf of the Mexican government, or a lack of capability. Either way, it’s the same result for the United States. Chaos, heartache, terrorism, murder, and it needs to be put to an end.

Thus the second part of the plan: passing an Authorization to Use Military Force.

The second step that we will be engaging in is give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist. Not to invade Mexico. Not to shoot Mexican airplanes down. But to destroy drug labs that are poisoning Americans.

What kind of nonsense is this? When a military enters a sovereign country against the wishes of that country’s people and its legitimate government, that’s an invasion. The definition of an invasion is simple, both in common usage and international law: It’s when armed forces enter another state without consent.

Invading another country is a fundamental crime, codified in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.” This, precisely, is what we’re trying to get through Putin’s thick skull.

Even threatening to invade is considered a crime of aggression under international law. So is planning to invade. See the Rome Statute:

Article 8 bis3
Crime of aggression

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression:

   1. (a)  The invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof;

It doesn’t matter why your military is entering the territory of a sovereign country. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to help. It doesn’t matter if you don’t plan to occupy or plunder that country, or if you’re only targeting drug traffickers, or if you genuinely think everyone will be better off as a result. It is still an invasion—a point to which you’d think the Washington Post’s editors would have been more alert.

Under international law, an invasion is legal under three and only three circumstances. Under Article 51, Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, states may mobilize their military forces in self-defense if they’re attacked. So may their allies. Next, according to Article 42, Chapter VII, the UN Security Council may authorize the use of force to restore international peace and security. Finally, there’s the Responsibility to Protect—the protection of civilians from mass atrocity crimes, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing. and crimes against humanity.

You may be thinking that when two hundred Americans die daily, that’s a mass atrocity. And it is a mass catastrophe, certainly. But manufacturing fentanyl that’s smuggled into the United States is not the same thing as lobbing missiles over the border, no matter how many Americans perish. Why not? Because it isn’t an armed attack.

Fentanyl is a massive problem for the United States, and the cartels are made up of absolute psychopaths. But words have meanings. The use of military force in self-defense is governed by jus cogens:

a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.

The use of force must be governed, under jus cogens, by necessity and proportionality.³ In simple terms, this means you can’t invade a country if an obvious non-military remedy is available to you. There is an obvious, non-military remedy to the problem of fentanyl poisonings. It doesn’t require a single American cop, no less American troops. You know what that solution is. So does the entire world, so it’s no good pretending.

Stop using fentanyl.

No one is forcing fentanyl down Americans’ gullets. We’re eagerly gobbling the stuff up. We can’t get enough of it. We love our fentanyl. Mexico isn’t making us swallow it. The Jalisco Cartel isn’t tying us to a tree and pouring it down our throats. We’re dying of fentanyl poisoning at such prodigious rates because we love drugs—and that is a we problem, not a them problem. It’s preposterous to announce that you propose to invade your neighbor because you are an addict.

I appreciate that fentanyl is showing up in other drugs, that your cocaine might be laced with it, that you might buy a tab of what you thought was Oxycontin and die of a fentanyl overdose. It doesn’t change the situation: If you don’t snort coke or buy Oxy on the black market, you won’t die of a fentanyl overdose.

But what of Americans’ right to unadulterated recreational drugs?

Look, I’m sympathetic to that, really I am. But you try sending our diplomats out to the General Assembly to explain that we invaded Mexico because they cut our blow.

“But Claire,” I hear you saying, “Come on. Since when has the US given a damn about international law? We’re Americans! We pay for the General Assembly. Grenada! Libya! Iraq! So many places I can’t even remember them! We do what the hell we please. When you’re a superpower, they let you do it.”

I’m sympathetic to this argument, too. I agree that if we really need to invade another country, we shouldn’t take lectures on international law from tiers-mondiste scolds who put Russia, China, and Cuba on their Human Rights Council.

But we don’t really need to invade Mexico. It’s entirely optional. We would not be in the right. And the timing of this idiotic proposal couldn’t be worse, seeing as we’re engaged in an effort to persuade the world that it’s wrong—very wrong—for Russia to invade its own smaller, weaker neighbor. We’re trying to discredit miserable Russian excuses for invading their neighbors, not imitate them. (And Russia’s excuses may be miserable, but they’re better than “They cut our blow.”)

It matters a great deal whether countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia believe us—and support us—when we insist we’re defending the principle that big, powerful countries must not invade their smaller neighbors. Putin argues that in our concern for Ukraine, the United States is entirely hypocritical. That we support Ukraine only to expand our hegemony by means of our NATO lapdogs. That in invading Ukraine, he’s done nothing we wouldn’t do if our neighbors began to irritate us. That this is simply the way of the world: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

These arguments are obscene. So why does the GOP seem determined to prove his point? Introducing a bill that authorizes such an invasion cuts our diplomacy off at the knees. It makes us look insane. Invading Mexico? Seriously?

And yes, invading Mexico is exactly what Graham is proposing. Let’s return to his press conference. He said that the precedent for this was Plan Colombia, passed in the Clinton era. He noted that Biden had enthusiastically supported Plan Colombia. He hoped, he said, to have the Mexican government’s cooperation. But failing that, “We’re going to have to do what’s in our national interest. Mexico is a safe haven, it is a narco-terrorist state.” Listen to him: Any native speaker of English will grasp that he’s saying our military should forcibly enter Mexico.

Senator Kennedy briefly took the podium to agree with Graham:

I don’t mean any disrespect, but both President Biden and President Lopez-Obrador, when it comes to the border and the drug cartels, have been sheep in sheep’s clothing. And this has gone on long enough. If you have the will, we in America have the ability to help President AMLO, as some call him, eradicate these drug cartels. … We’re friends with Mexico, we just wanna help. But at some point … somebody has to do something.

Does this sound like a man who opposes forcibly entering Mexico? No, this sounds like a threat. Because it is.

Graham then said that Plan Mexico would be “more lethal than Plan Colombia.” He would love, he said, to use military force in conjunction with the Mexican army. “But you’ve got to have a willing partner.” Again, if you listen to him, you’ll understand that he plainly meant, “and if we don’t have one, we’ll do this alone.”

Asked whether the bill would hurt our relationship with Mexico, he replied,

You know, I’m not really worried about hurting our relationship with Mexico. I’m trying to make it better. What kind of neighbor is this? … So, to our Mexican neighbors, you’re failing your own citizens and you’re putting America at risk. You need to do more. We’d like to help you, but we’re not gonna sit on the sidelines any more as a nation and watch our neighbor become a narco-state that kills more Americans in a single year than we lost in Vietnam.

It’s clear as day that he didn’t mean, “But I suppose if you don’t help, we’ll have to sit on the sidelines, because of course we can’t send our military into Mexico unless the Mexican government invites us.”

He then addressed the Mexican president directly:

To the President of Mexico: You have let your country slide into the hands of narco-terrorists. Your capability or your will doesn’t exist to the point to stop what is, I think, the poisoning of America. You’re leaving us with no other choices. This has been going on for how long? We’ve been talking about this for at least a decade. But fentanyl is a game changer.

To the President of Mexico: Fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction being unleashed on America from your country. It’s coming from your country. You’re allowing safe havens for these groups to operate with impunity. Because what you’re doing is not working. Your country is being used by narcoterrorists to poison America.

We ask you to help us. The best thing is if we work together, but I will tell the president of Mexico that what you’re doing is not working. We’re going to change the game. We’re going to up the ante. Here’s what I hope will happen: We’re going to terrorize the terrorists. If you get on a cellphone, it may be the last call you make. I can tell you what it’s like to be a terrorist when the US military is on your ass. You don’t sleep well at night. You know, the terrorists who live in caves, they’re committed to their cause. The narcoterrorists live in mansions, out there in the open, buying fancy cars. We know where you live, and we know how you make your money. So my goal is to make sure you don’t sleep well at night. That the cost of doing business when it comes to poisoning America goes up. That when you try to get somebody to join your cartel, they say, “No, thank you, the last guy got killed, or went to jail.” Until you do that, nothing’s going to change. We need to unleash the fury of the United States on these narcoterrorists. And we’re gonna do it.

… If we have to do it by ourselves, we’ll do it by ourselves.

That’s not ambiguous. It’s not confusing. I could find no report indicating that Graham later took this back.

Graham also appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime to deliver the same message. When asked how he proposed dealing with the drug cartels, he replied, “I’d put Mexico on notice. If you continue to give safe haven to fentanyl drug dealers, then you’re an enemy of the United States.”

Mexico? An enemy of the United States?

“I would tell the Mexican government if you don’t clean up your act, we’re going to clean it up for you.”

That’s entirely clear. And it’s madness. Speaking that way is madness. To what end is he saying this? Does he think it will encourage Mexico to welcome our assistance? Of course not. This makes it politically impossible for AMLO to accept it, even if he thinks it over and concludes, “Yes, it would be best if Americans sent their kids to fight the cartels—why should we sacrifice our own?” Anyone with the slightest sensitivity to natural human emotions understands why this is an immensely counterproductive thing to say—why no matter how much they loathe the cartels, Mexicans will react with outrage.

Lopez-Obrador responded as you’d expect him to respond, which is to say much as Americans would respond if Mexico threatened to invade the United States on the grounds that our insatiable demand for drugs and our weapons—whose flow into Mexico we’ve failed to control—created the drug cartels that have so blighted their lives. (That argument is every bit as solid as our case for invading Mexico.) “We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory,” said Lopez-Obrador, “much less that a government’s armed forces intervene.”

Mexico, he added, was a sovereign state and “not a protectorate of the United States, nor a colony of the United States.” He condemned Graham’s statements—correctly—as “aggression” against Mexico. He understood his words, he said, as a threat to invade his country. As indeed they were. He asked, “Why don’t you attend to your grave problem of social decomposition and mitigate drug consumption?”

He also noted that Mexicans, unlike Americans, aren’t overdosing on Fentanyl. About this he was also correct. If you want proof that this is a demand problem, not a supply problem, there it is.

I don’t have polling data at my fingertips, but a quick perusal of Mexican Twitter suggests Graham’s proposals were about as well-received as you’d expect:

FRZ @FRZ99035780

@RepDanCrenshaw @USATODAY Don't sniff too much of it !

Lopez-Obrador dismissed the threats as domestic political posturing, and he’s likely correct in this, too. But bad ideas like this can escape the campaign trail and take on a life of their own. Graham and Kennedy aren’t alone. They’re expressing the views of a major US political party. They also speak for a non-trivial number of Democrats.

Congressmen Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz have also introduced a bill authorizing the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against nine cartels.⁴ The chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, said the US should have a “military presence” in Mexico. He repeated the claim that Trump ordered the military to bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico, regretfully noting that “for some reason the military didn’t do it.” Senator John Cornyn, in a meeting of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, repeated the comparison of the cartels to al Qaeda: “Just like 9-11, just like we would react to the falling out of the sky each day for a year, we would react in an overwhelming fashion.”

We’ve seen in recent years how quickly ideas like these can make the journey in the public mind from “manifestly insane” to “policy demand.” Consider Ron DeSantis’s embrace of the anti-vax agenda. Or the call to defund the police. It is not to be minimized that politicians of this stature are demanding the invasion of Mexico. They could well gain the power, in the next election cycle, to do just that. This crew has a pattern of stirring up populist appetites for electoral gain; discovering that the crowd they’ve whipped up took them seriously; then, upon surveying the baying crowd, deciding it would be more expedient—and certainly safer—just to give the people what they want.

In his memoirs, Mike Pompeo described his eagerness to bomb Mexico.⁵ Recently, Bill Barr echoed the call to invade Mexico on Fox:

Jesse Watters Primetime @jesseprimetime

Bill Barr: The cartels are killing us at the same rate as if we were in a major war #FoxNews

Jesse Watters asked him, “What does it mean when you say we need to treat the Mexican cartels like terrorists? … You’d have to do something unilaterally, in terms of an air strike? Helicopter raids? What are we talking about here?”

“We have to deal with this group like we dealt with ISIS,” said Barr.

May I remind Bill Barr that we leveled whole cities dealing with ISIS? We dropped a 500-pound bomb and two 2,000-pound explosives on a crowd of women and children in Baghuz. We dropped ten thousand bombs on Raqaa. We dropped 80,000 pounds of weapons on Islamic State targets on Qanus Island. In 2017, we dropped 39,577 bombs on ISIS targets. In March of that year alone, we killed nearly 2,000 civilians. We dropped the Mother of all Bombs—the largest non-nuclear bomb ever dropped in combat—on Nangarhar Province. The US strategy against ISIS was defined, said Defense Secretary James Mattis, by “annihilation tactics.” And you want to do this to Mexico?

The Global Coalition to fight Daesh was composed of 79 countries and five international organizations. It operated in compliance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, as well as Resolutions 2170 (August 15, 2014) and 2178 (September 27, 2014), on the basis of a request for assistance submitted to the Chairman of the Security Council by the Iraqi Representative to the UN on September 20, 2014. The war was legal, and despite its horror, just. Does anyone think the world would cooperate with us like this in leveling Mexican cities? Because our citizens keep overdosing?

But this is exactly what Barr said: “We have to deal with this group like we dealt with ISIS.” Barr is known for choosing his words with reasonable care.

How is it that we’re even discussing this? Leveling Mexican cities?

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Are they serious, I wonder? Do prominent American representatives truly think it’s time to invade Mexico? Or that it would ever be a good time to invade Mexico? Or is this pure political theater—meant to tickle the base with a good, bloodthirsty fantasy?

The Bulwark asked the same question: Does the Right want an Iraq War in Mexico?

While their proposal initially might strike you at first as sounding like launching Operation Desert Storm in America’s number-one foreign vacation spot, Crenshaw and Waltz offered a more tempered view of what an AUMF would actually entail. …

… the bill would not provide a free-for-all license to attack these organizations at the whim of an Army commander near the border or the captain of a Tomahawk-equipped destroyer traversing the Gulf of Mexico. “It becomes just an authorization to actually create a strategy,” Crenshaw says. “We don’t create the strategy necessarily. That’s the president’s job. So it’s just the first step.”

From this, it sounds as if the point of passing these bills is to signal to the Mexican government that we’re deeply unhappy and put pressure on them either to crack down on the cartels themselves or let us do it. Graham et. al’s talk about going it alone is almost certainly a bluff.

But it’s an idiotic bluff, given the threat itself is a crime of aggression, under international law. It makes us look like what people who make threats like this are: bullies and thugs. In the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine, it also makes us look like exactly the hypocrites Putin claims us to be.

The Bulwark continues:

The authors say they took as a model the United States’ approach to tackling the drug cartels in Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s, which Crenshaw said worked “because we had a strong partner in the Colombian government. This is what we’ve been lacking in Mexico.” In Mexico’s case, by contrast, the cartels are embedded in many areas of government.

“And so in Mexico, I think you’ve got to leverage [the Mexican government] more. I think that’s one of the reasons AUMF is useful. Because it lets them know we’re serious,” Crenshaw said. “The problem with this Mexican president [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] is he doesn’t apparently want to solve the problem.” So the AUMF approach puts pressure on López Obrador to act, in hopes of something more like a Colombia-style collaboration with the United States.

This reinforces the idea that these proposals are meant to be a negotiating strategy, not a true effort to facilitate an invasion.

The Bulwark is relieved by this, but they shouldn’t be. The AUMF just might pass a divided Congress. Biden might even sign it. How many executives can resist the opportunity to have open-ended power?

Perhaps from a sense that the imperatives of politics demand it, the Biden Administration has declined to pour cold water on the idea. Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, declined to answer when asked whether Biden would use the US military against Mexican cartels. She certainly didn’t take the opportunity to say, “Are you insane?” Instead, she said, “I’m just not going to get into the military and how it’s being used.” Some Democrats seem quite warm to the idea of invading Mexico: When asked, Texas Democratic representative Vicente Gonzalez said, “We should consider every single option.”

The AUMF passed after 9/11 has since been invoked to justify at least 37 military operations in fourteen countries without a formal declaration of war or even a public debate. We’re still debating whether to rescind the 1991 and 2002 Iraq AUMFs. AUMFs have been used to authorize wars against groups that didn’t even exist when they were passed.⁶ An AUMF is a blunt instrument.

I’m fairly sure Biden wouldn’t invade Mexico. But Crenshaw’s AUMF would last for five years. It would not only authorize this president but the next one to invade Mexico. Who, considering the state of our domestic politics, could imagine passing such a bill a good idea?

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Question 4: Is it a good idea to pass an AUMF that gives the US President a blank check to go to war in Mexico?

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It’s true that there is a precedent in Plan Colombia. If Mexico invites us, that changes things, of course. But I don’t expect them to invite us, not least because Mexico probably remembers how Plan Colombia went.⁷

All of that now seems forgotten. The combination of American indifference to events overseas and amnesia is so powerful that prominent members of Congress can say, “Plan Colombia is the outcome we desire”—and no one says, “Seriously?” Plan Colombia is precisely how the cartels took root in Mexico, as noted in this CFR backgrounder: Mexico’s Long War: Drugs, Crime, and the Cartels:

Mexican cartels began to take on a much larger role in the late 1980s, after US government agencies broke up Caribbean networks used by Colombian cartels to smuggle cocaine. Mexican gangs eventually shifted from being couriers for Colombian criminal organizations, including the infamous Cali and Medellín cartels, to being wholesalers. By 2007, Mexican cartels controlled an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States.

They also note: “The US government, despite waging a ‘war on drugs’ and conducting other counternarcotics efforts abroad, has made little progress in reducing demand.” (This is the key point.)

These resolutions are, I suppose, meant to be a bit of raw meat for the base and, at best, a negotiating ploy. But things like this can get out of control. Sometimes, it takes just a well-timed atrocity, a hopped-up crowd, and an irresponsible leader for a plainly insane idea to become reality.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @RepMTG

Our military should be stationed at our southern border. We should strategically strike and take out the Mexican Cartels, not the Mexican government or their people, but the Mexican Cartels which control them all. They are international terrorists and criminals murdering… https://t.co/4ETBxyfXQs

“Not the Mexican government or their people,” she says. I’m sure that’s reassuring to Mexicans who have studied our long tradition of surgically striking Yemeni wedding parties, Afghan hospitals, and the occasional Chinese embassy.

That’s what happens when you go to war. It is inherent to the enterprise. You’d think we might know that by now. There’s no reason to think this would go any better than the Iraq War. Or Afghanistan. There’s an every reason to think it could go worse. For one thing, refugees from Iraq couldn’t readily get to the US, nor could the bloodthirsty, vengeance-minded relatives of the Iraqis we killed. If we turn our own neighborhood into a charnel house, we can’t pack our bags, leave, and forget all about it. We break it, we really own it.

I wonder: How would Americans feel when they got their first good look at “collateral damage”—in Mexico? A lot of Americans have been to Mexico. A lot of Americans come from Mexico. I don’t think, for all the bluster, that anyone wants to see that. They couldn’t, could they?

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Question 5: Could Americans really stomach the sight of what would be left of a Mexican wedding party after one of of our drones made a targeting error?

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Question 6: What do people think is apt to happen if we use the US military—made for breaking things, not building them—to pursue the cartels?

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Question 7: How long would it take Russia to put weapons in the hands of Mexican “freedom fighters?”

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I don’t wish what I’m saying to be understood as a diminishment of the gravity of the situation in Mexico. Or the tragedy. When I was 17, I spent a month backpacking through Mexico with my friends. We passed many happy days exploring exactly the regions of Mexico that the State Department now says no American should dream of visiting. Never once did we think, nor did anyone suggest, that these parts of the country were so dangerous that it would be mad for a trio of American teenagers to travel there.

The decline in Mexico’s security has been vertiginous, astonishing, and tragic. If I were AMLO—and if I believed the US military capable of restoring Mexican tranquility—I would gratefully accept the offer of American assistance.

But I would strongly doubt that the US is capable of restoring Mexican tranquility. After all, how good is our record on such things, really?

Do we truly imagine the union of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs would produce beautiful issue?

Be honest.

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Question 8: Should we invade Mexico?

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Further reading:

• Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations, by the Congressional Research Service.

• Fentanyl and geopolitics: Controlling opioid supply from China, by the Brookings Institute.

• Sealing the Borders: The Effects of Increased Military Participation in Drug Interdiction, by the Rand Corporation. This two-year study was concluded in 1988:

  Rising concern with drug use in the United States has led to increased emphasis on the interdiction of drugs before they reach the country. The military services are now being asked to assume a substantial share of the burden of this interdiction. This report analyzes the consequences of greater stringency in drug interdiction efforts, focusing particularly on how such increased stringency might influence the consumption of cocaine and marijuana. The analysis strongly suggests that a major increase in interdiction activities, even including the military, is unlikely to significantly reduce drug consumption in the United States.

  As far as I know, no serious study has challenged this conclusion. From Newsday, at the time:

  The researchers noted that seven previous studies in the past nine years, including ones by the Center for Naval Research and the Office of Technology Assessment, have come to similar conclusions. The report was released in March, about the time that many members of Congress began to clamor for a military role in drug interdiction, but it has received almost no publicity. “It’s become too politically dangerous not to do something about the drug problem, and the military offers you something immediate and visible even if it won’t work,” said Peter Reuter, the senior Rand economist who was the main author of the report.

1. These, according to the State Department, are the legal ramifications of designation:

1. It is unlawful for a person in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated FTO. (The term “material support or resources” is defined in 18 U.S.C. § 2339A(b)(1) as “any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who maybe or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials.” 18 U.S.C. § 2339A(b)(2) provides that for these purposes “the term ‘training’ means instruction or teaching designed to impart a specific skill, as opposed to general knowledge.” 18 U.S.C. § 2339A(b)(3) further provides that for these purposes the term ‘expert advice or assistance’ means advice or assistance derived from scientific, technical or other specialized knowledge.’’

2. Representatives and members of a designated FTO, if they are aliens, are inadmissible to and, in certain circumstances, removable from the United States (see 8 U.S.C. §§ 1182 (a)(3)(B)(i)(IV)-(V), 1227 (a)(1)(A)).

3. Any US financial institution that becomes aware that it has possession of or control over funds in which a designated FTO or its agent has an interest must retain possession of or control over the funds and report the funds to the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of the Treasury.

Other Effects of Designation

1. Supports our efforts to curb terrorism financing and to encourage other nations to do the same.

2. Stigmatizes and isolates designated terrorist organizations internationally.

3. Deters donations or contributions to and economic transactions with named organizations.

4. Heightens public awareness and knowledge of terrorist organizations.

5. Signals to other governments our concern about named organizations.

Certainly, it would be highly desirable for these ramifications to be felt by the cartels. But might it be better to accomplish this via new legislation that specifically targets the cartels? What’s the added value of calling them “terrorist organizations?” Would this dilute the impact of the word “terrorist?” The list stigmatizes and isolates designated terrorist organizations precisely because we don’t put everyone who vexes us on the list. As of now, other governments really pay attention when State calls them to say, e.g., “We believe you have three inbound terrorists on flight 382 from Karachi, would you kindly wrap them up and send them to us.” If we start putting transnational criminal organizations on the list, will it become too bloated to be taken seriously? Once you put the Mexican cartels on the list, wouldn’t it be irresistible to put every other violent transnational organization on the list?

I’m not against the idea. It may be a good one. I just wonder why they’re doing it this way. They’re legislators, after all; they can purpose-write legislation that achieves the same effect without using the word “terrorist,” which has a specific, disparate legal meaning and a disparate meaning in common usage, too.

2. Note too that the article reports that López Obrador’s administration has seized more precursors in four years than his predecessor did in his six-year term. Obviously, it hasn’t helped. There is no way to end this problem by focusing on the supply side: It cannot be done.

3. Our reader Eric Hines has written a clear and thorough guide to these concepts: A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars.

4. For those keeping score: Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation, Gulf, Los Zetas, Northeast, Juarez, Tijuana, Beltran-Levya, and La Familia Michoacana (also known as the Knights Templar).

5. Or so it has been reported; I haven’t read them yet.

6. See, e.g., How the 2002 Iraq AUMF Got to Be So Dangerous, Parts 1 and 2, on the Lawfare blog:

… The key question in weighing repeal is not what the 2002 Iraq AUMF does authorize, but what it could authorize. In the eyes of the executive branch, 20 years of interbranch practice has put an enabling gloss on the 2002 AUMF’s broad language that makes it a potential vehicle for military activity of nearly any type or scale so long as there is some nexus to Iraq. Such carte blanche authorization should be of deep concern to Congress, particularly when tied to a country that has a complex relationship with one of the United States’ most contentious rivals, Iran. And while there may be good reasons to question the validity of this interpretation, there are few signs that the federal courts or any other institution is willing and able to restrain a future president from relying on them, unless and until Congress itself acts.

7. To refresh your memory:

• Rights groups allege Colombian atrocities: The number of civilians killed by the Colombian armed forces has soared, activist groups allege, with many of the abuses committed by army units that had been vetted by the State Department … the Colombian military has been plagued by accusations of atrocities, including extrajudicial killings called “false positives” in which armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas.

• The Saddest Country: On Assignment in Colombia.

• Blueprint for a New Colombia Policy, by the Center for International Policy:

  … the stated objectives of Plan Colombia have not been achieved. A variety of deeply disturbing trends make plain that this policy is failing. A fundamental re-thinking is urgently required.

  1. Failure to reduce the availability or use of cocaine and heroin in the United States. Despite stable if not rising demand, the US prices of cocaine and heroin continue to decline. The number of current cocaine users is on the rise, including a 13 percent increase from 2002 to 2003. The numbers of new cocaine and heroin users in recent years are considerably higher than during the mid-1990s, and use is beginning at younger ages. …

  2. Increased human rights violations committed by the military and continued army-paramilitary collaboration. Reports of human rights violations by the military, including extrajudicial executions and torture, have increased, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ). …

  3. Moving backwards on impunity. Due to a notable lack of political will in the Attorney General’s office since Luis Camilo Osorio assumed the position in 2001, Colombia has made no progress toward ending widespread impunity for human rights abusers. In fact, the problem seems to be getting worse. …

• Corruption and Plan Colombia: The Missing Link, by Transparency International. (Their cautions are particularly relevant: Which do we think more plausible—that our military will rid Mexico of its corruption or that Mexico will corrupt our military?)

• Plan Colombia: Illegal Drugs, Economic Development, and Counterinsurgency: An Econometric Analysis of Colombia’s Failed War:

  This article examines the socioeconomic effects of the illegal drug industry on economic and social development in Colombia. It shows that illegal drugs have fostered violence and have had a negative effect on economic development. This article also shows that the anti-drug policy Plan Colombia has been a rather ineffective strategy to decrease drug production, generate economic development, and reduce violence.

• Plan Colombia: A Progress Report, by the Congressional Research Service:

  While there has been measurable progress in Colombia’s internal security, as indicated by decreases in violence, and in the eradication of drug crops, no effect has been seen with regard to price, purity, and availability of cocaine and heroin in the United States. Military operations against illegally armed groups have intensified, but the main leftist guerrilla group seems no closer to agreeing to a cease-fire. The demobilization of rightist paramilitary fighters is proceeding, but without a legal framework governing the process. Critics of US policy argue that respect for human rights by the Colombian security forces is still a problem, and that counternarcotics programs have negative consequences for the civilian population, and for the promotion of democracy in general.