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The War, Next-door
By David Glenn Cox
“Obsessed with the power of Spain in his youth, Cromwell failed to note the rise of France.” The same can be said of our own current Cromwell, obsessed with the desire to restart and reframe the cold war under a Republican unipolar stance, they have lost sight of everything else. Watching their Neocon kite intently as it dances on the breeze until they’ve run with it, off the cliff.
Like Cromwell, they have become omnipotent, until it is not only wrong to question but to think about questioning. Our own Cromwell came to power promising to return respect to our institutions and respect to the office of the President. Now, today, all the machinery lies broken and rusting in the mud. All of the plans failed, all of the promises false, all of the money spent. The debates are over, the wars are lost.
The ancient Sun Tzu once warned, “When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.”
It is now that we will begin to face those chieftains, those challenges, the legacy of the false religion of Neocon Fascism and Neoliberalism under the guise of economic colonialism, wearing the robes of the false messiah called free trade. Our Cromwell, obsessed with controlling the Middle East, has lost sight of controlling his own hemisphere. Just like the old Roman emperors, their legions far flung, could not control their own capital our even their own house.
The birth of any political system that does not have justice as its mentor, becomes like a false religion. Its adherents promoted by their religious fervor, rather than their wisdom, until even the goals of the religion become clouded by the jabbering faithful in the temples, spouting the religion's slogans. Might then does make right and right is unquestioned. To question is to oppose and if right is unquestioned; who are you to oppose? Reality is thus matched to the prophecies as the prophecies are interpreted to match the realities.
It is only then, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, that the leaders and Pharisees accept realities and either seek their hiding place or die in the bunker. Their mission failed, they believe, because it is we that have failed them. If only we had given them more and complained less it would not be so today. These are the legacies of the Gang of Four, the November Criminals, and those who refused to let us conquer in Vietnam. The basis for their eventual redemption, the planting of false seeds today which will become the endearing truths of tomorrow.
This myopic belief in their divine mission allows them and frees them from all of the offices of the mundane. Katrina is the white, marble pillar in the temple of not-our-problem! We are on a holy mission here; we are saving the world for you! Yet, you hinder us and burden us with the troubles of the insignificant! They should have left the area, end of story. They shouldn’t have signed those mortgages; they shouldn’t have joined the military, end of story. Yet, from those same high altars where they preach their sermons: we couldn’t expect, our intelligence was false, but now that we are there we must continue on to preserve our honor. Our Honor.
Having neglecting all but their holy mission, we are left with our weapons dulled, our treasuries empty, our ardor dampened, but with our honor intact. Praise them to the most high, they who care so little for our health and well-being yet care so much for our honor. The temples of free trade are rocked by food shortages and food potentially going to the highest bidder. The opening of borders allowing the easy transport of contraband that lines the pockets of the high priests who preach to the faithful only the mantras of good news.
All is good, they have preached to us from their high altars as gunfire on our border drowns out the choir. “Obsessed with the power of Spain in his youth, Cromwell failed to note the rise of France.” Our Cromwell, obsessed with the glittering jewel, Iraq, failed to note the demise of Mexico.
Its presidential election clouded, its president sworn in, in a back room because his safety couldn’t be guaranteed. Ten percent of its population fleeing the country to escape its grinding poverty, exacerbated by the demons of free trade. Fighting civil wars and rebellions on both its southern and northern borders. The Zapitista’s in the south seek to break government oppression just as drug gangs in the north seek to break the stranglehold of government corruption, but for opposite purposes.
The Associated press reported in 2003:
"Members of an elite Mexican army unit have deserted and formed a drug gang, using their military training to launch a violent battle for control of this border city," Mexico's top antidrug prosecutor said.
“The battles have taken 87 lives since 2002 and have involved unprecedented alliances among Mexico's drug cartels," said Nuevo Laredo police commander, Martin Landa Herrera. "I don't think anything like this has happened before in Mexico," he said. "I have never heard of this many cartels fighting for one piece of territory."
Nobody has to tell Houston resident Noe Villarreal how vicious the war has become. On Sept. 27, a commando unit of at least 30 masked men, carrying assault rifles, kidnapped his brother - Hayward, Calif., businessman Juan Villarreal
Garcia - from his Mexico home in Sabinas Hidalgo, a town south of Nuevo Laredo. Six other hostages were released soon afterward, but Villarreal is missing and is presumed dead.
In September of last year, according to the Associated press:
“A deadly attack on federal intelligence agents in northern Mexico was a botched kidnapping attempt orchestrated by drug traffickers with increasingly advanced counterintelligence capabilities," a state government official said Monday. Natividad Gonzalez, governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, said federal intelligence officers were tipped off that alleged members of Mexico's Gulf drug cartel "wanted to kidnap two or three agents" prior to the attack last Tuesday in the state capital of Monterrey. Two officers were killed and two more wounded in the ensuing shootout.
Also last year, there was a reported shootout where drug gangs fired RPG’s at government troops, leaving thirteen dead. This week the BBC reported a shootout in Tijuana: “Gun battles between rival factions of a Mexican drugs cartel have left at least 15 people dead in the city of Tijuana, near the border with the US. Police said all the dead were from the Arellano Felix cartel, which has come under pressure from a rival gang. Two were wearing police uniforms or equipment, but are thought to have been gang members, police say. Drug-related violence is a serious issue across Mexico. Nearly 200 people have been killed in Tijuana this year.”
Some 190 people have been killed in Tijuana so far this year. In 2007, there were almost 3,000 drug killings across Mexico in 2008 in escalated to 5,400. Yet, our Cromwell assures us the surge is working, as Baghdad is now safer from factional fighting than Tijuana. As the death toll in Mexico exceeds Afghanistan, US troops seek to curtail the Afghan poppy harvest and fail to look in their own back yard. A five-hour shootout between rebels and government troops, not a stone's throw from the American border.
“Obsessed with the power of Spain in his youth, Cromwell failed to note the rise of France.”
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