The Occupation Of Mexico

Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and retired colonel from the U.S. Army, has written a first class book entitled The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). The book outlines the triple crisis facing America today - the economy, in remarkable disarray, can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad; the government, transformed by an imperial presidency, is a democracy in form only; the nation's involvement in endless wars, driven by a deep infatuation with military power, has been a catastrophe for the body politic.

Bacevich has provided an interesting essay in the November 2009 edition of Harper's Magazine. He flips the Afghanistan "out or in" discussion and debate rather nicely on its head with the following series of questions:

For those who, despite all this, still hanker to have a go at nation building, why start with Afghanistan? Why not first fix, say Mexico? In terms of its importance to the United States, our southern neighbor - a major supplier of oil and drugs among other commodities deemed vital to the American way of life - outranks Afghanistan by several orders of magnitude.

If one believes that moral considerations rather than self-interest should inform foreign policy, Mexico still qualifies for priority attention. Consider the theft of California. Or consider more recently how the American appetite for illicit drugs and our lax gun laws have corroded Mexican institutions and produced an epidemic of violence afflicting ordinary Mexicans. Yet any politician calling for the commitment of 60,000 U.S. troops to Mexico to secure those interests or acquit those moral obligations would be laughed out of Washington - and rightly so. Any pundit proposing that the United States assume responsibility for eliminating the corruption endemic in Mexican politics while establishing in Mexico City effective mechanisms of governance would have his license to pontificate revoked. Anyone suggesting that the United States possesses the wisdom and the wherewithal to solve the problem of Mexican drug trafficking, to endow Mexico with competent security forces, and to reform the Mexican school system (while protecting the rights of Mexican women) would be dismissed as a lunatic. Meanwhile, those who promote such programs for Afghanistan, ignoring questions of cost and ignoring as well the corruption and ineffectiveness that pervade our own institutions, are treated as sages.