Prometheus 6

Get Your War On said it best...

"Remeber when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"

No, just simply without the Cold War, insurgencies need an independent source of cash because genereous superpower and rogue state patrons ain't what they used to be. They give out money here and there but not like when the US and the USSR were squaring off in CA, Namibia, Afghanistan and Cambodia in the 1980's.

Where the FMLN once relied upon Cuba,, FARC and it's far right paramilitary rivals have siezed the drug trade instead of just levying " war taxes " on smugglers. Weapons, supplies, electronic equipment, safe houses, medicine, false documents all cost money.

In Africa it's usually diamond smuggling and in Central and SE Asia it's heroin. Kidnapping, extortion, sex trade slavery and old fashioned slavery are also money-raisers for Marxist guerilla groups, Islamist terrorists and fascist death squads.

I can't wait till Afghanistan is a major player in this new, fun, infinite wargame. Wait, they already are.

The term "narcoterrorist" was first (and only) used by Ashcroft, and it's an attempt to tie drug trafficking to terrorism in the same way that Iraq was "tied" to Al Qaeda (which I will one day learn to spell)…a back-door justification of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.

Does this mean we are bringing the same brilliant techniques used in the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Terror" namely, instead of addressing the conditions that cause the problem and working to address the concerns of any anti-American groups, we will make an example out of any large enough anti-American group that takes on a political bent by locking up or killing all their senior leadership, to ensure that the youngest, craziest, ruthless ones are the ones who call the shots? Great plan!

I should have been clearer I was talking more about street gangs than drug cartels. I pry should have typed the "War on Gangs". (Haven't they declared one of those yet?)

The second problem is they define the enemy too broadly. I know I saw somewhere this week that Al Qaeda only has 190 members. How about we get them, instead of declaring war against the rest of the Muslim world?