Mexican Drug Cartels Are Worse Than ISIL

Western Obsession With The Islamic State Is Fueled More By Bigotry Than Any Genuine Assessment Of Risk Or Atrocities

The horrific rampage of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has captured the world’s attention. Many Western commentators have characterized ISIL’s crimes as unique, no longer practiced anywhere else in the civilized world. They argue that the group’s barbarism is intrinsically Islamic, a product of the aggressive and archaic worldview that dominates the Muslim world. The ignorance of these claims is stunning.

While there are other organized groups whose depravity and threat to the United States far surpasses that of ISIL, none has engendered the same kind of collective indignation and hysteria. This raises a question: Are Americans primarily concerned with ISIL’s atrocities or with the fact that Muslims are committing these crimes?

For example, even as the U.S. media and policymakers radically inflate ISIL’s threat to the Middle East and United States, most Americans appear to be unaware of the scale of the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels and the threat they pose to the United States.

Cartels versus ISIL

A recent United Nations report estimated nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed and 17,386 wounded in Iraq in 2014, more than half since ISIL fighters seized large parts on northern Iraq in June. It is likely that the group is responsible another several thousand deaths in Syria. To be sure, these numbers are staggering. 

But in 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.

Statistics alone do not convey the depravity and threat of the cartels. 

They carry out hundreds of beheadings every year. In addition to decapitations, the cartels are known to dismember and otherwise mutilate the corpses of their victims — displaying piles of bodies prominently in towns to terrorize the public into compliance. They routinely target women and children to further intimidate communities. Like ISIL, the cartels use social media to post graphic images of their atrocious crimes.

The narcos also recruit child soldiers, molding boys as young as 11 into assassins or sending them on suicide missions during armed confrontations with Mexico’s army. They kidnap tens of thousands of children every year to use as drug mules or prostitutes or to simply kill and harvest their organs for sale on the black market. Those who dare to call for reforms often end up dead. 

In September, with the apparent assistance of local police, cartels kidnapped and massacred 43 students at a teaching college near the Mexican town ofIguala in response to student protests. A search in the area for the students has uncovered a number of mass graves containing mutilated bodies burned almost beyond recognition, but none of the remains have been confirmed to be of the students.

While the Islamic militants have killed a handful of journalists, the cartels murdered as many as 57 since 2006 for reporting on cartel crimes or exposing government complicity with the criminals. Many of Mexico’s media have been effectively silenced by intimidation or bribes. 

These censorship activities extend beyond professional media, with narcos tracking down and murdering ordinary citizens who criticize them on the Internet, leaving their naked and disemboweled corpses hanging in public squares. 

Yet American intellectuals such as Sam Harris appear to be more outraged when Muslims protest or issue threats in response to blasphemous or anti-Muslim hate speech than when cartels murder dozens of journalists and systematically co-opt an entire country’s media.

Similarly, Westerners across various political spectrums were outraged when ISIL seized 1,500 Yazidi women, committing sexual violence against the captives and using them as slaves. Here again, the cartels’ capture and trafficking of women dwarfs ISIL’s crimes. Narcos hold tens of thousands of Mexican citizens as slaves for their various enterprises and systematically use rape as a weapon of war.

U.S. media have especially hyped ISIL’s violence against Americans. This summer ISIL beheaded two Americans and has warned about executing a third; additionally, one U.S. Marine has died in efforts to combat the group. By contrast, the cartels killed 293 Americans in Mexico from 2007 to 2010 and have repeatedly attacked U.S. consulates in Mexico. While ISIL’s beheadings are no doubt outrageous, the cartels tortured, dismembered and then cooked one of the Americans they captured — possibly eating him or feeding him to dogs.

The US government cannot formulate an effective response to the narcos’ severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the US military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. 

The cartels’ atrocities are not restricted to the Mexican side of the border. From 2006 to 2010 as many as 5,700 Americans were killed in the U.S. by cartel-fueled drug violence. By contrast, 2,937 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Over the last decade, some 2,349 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, and 4,487 Americans died in Iraq. In four years the cartels have managed to cause the deaths of more Americans than during 9/11 or either of those wars.

Barack Obama’s administration claims ISIL poses a severe threat to U.S. interests and national security. However, the militants were primarily concerned with seizing and holding territory in Iraq and Syria until the U.S. began targeting them. Even now, while they have called for lone wolves to carry out attacks on targets in the United States, so far those arrested in connection to ISIL have been trying to go and fight abroad rather than plotting domestic attacks. To the extent ISIL wants to kill Americans, its primary tactic has been to try to lure U.S. troops to its turf by publicly executing citizens they already hold hostage. 

In fact, several U.S. intelligence officials have asserted that ISIL poses no credible threat to the United States homeland. 

However, the same cannot be said of the cartels.

Narcos have infiltrated at least 3,000 U.S. cities and are recruiting many Americans, including U.S. troops and law enforcement officers, to their organizations. They have an increasingly sophisticated and robust foundation in the U.S., with Mexican cartels now controlling more than 80 percent of the illicit drug trade in the United States and their top agents deployed to virtually every major metropolitan area. There are no realistic assessments indicating that ISIL could achieve a similar level of penetration in the United States.

Explaining The Dissonance

It is clear that the anti-ISIL campaign is not driven by the group’s relative threat to the United States or the scale or inhumane nature of their atrocities. If these were the primary considerations, the public would be far more terrified of and outraged by the narcos. Perhaps the U.S. would be mobilizing 50 nations to purge Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel rather than shielding it from prosecution, helping it polish off its rivals or even move drugs into the United States.

Some may argue that despite the asymmetries, the cartels are less of a threat than ISIL because ISIL is unified around an ideology, which is antithetical to the prevailing international order, while the cartels are concerned primarily with money. This is not true.

A good deal of the cartels’ violence is perpetrated ritualistically as part of their religion, which is centered, quite literally, on the worship of death. The narcosbuild and support churches all across Mexico to perpetuate their eschatology. One of the cartels, the Knights Templar (whose name evokes religious warfare), even boasts about its leader’s death and resurrection. When cartel members are killed, they are buried in lavish mausoleums, regarded as martyrs and commemorated in popular songs glorifying their exploits in all their brutality. Many of their members view the “martyrs” as heroes who diedresisting an international order that exploits Latin America and fighting the feckless governments that enable it. The cartels see their role as compensating for state failures in governance. The narco gospel, which derives fromCatholicism, is swiftly making inroads in the United States and Central America. In short, the cartels’ ideological disposition is no less pronounced than ISIL’s, if not worse.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government cannot formulate an effective response to these much more severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the U.S. military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. One thing is certain: America’s obsession with ISIL is fueled by Islamophobia rather than any empirical realities. 

Musa al-Gharbi is an instructor in the Department of Government and Public Service at the University of Arizona, and an affiliate of the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC).

The Public Is Always Ahead Of The Politicians

By Jon Basil Utley,
April 05, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Americans who despair of Washington ever cutting waste from its trillion dollar defense/homeland security budget can take heart from pollster Scott Rasmussen’s book The People’s Money. The author argues that the public is always ahead of the politicians and that the time is ripe for an effective leader to win election with real budget cuts. His polling shows that most Americans believe that the greatest threats to America are cyber warfare and deficit spending. This is amazing if one thinks how most TV just constantly bombards Americans that Iran or China or Arabs or Russia or other nebulous foreigners are out to get us, that they irrationally hate us because we are so good, as former President Bush used to claim. Today 82% of Americans believe economic threats are greater than military ones.

In a speech at Cato, Rasmussen used the analogy of the Battle of Lexington in 1775, the first in our Revolutionary War, which came 18 months before the Declaration of Independence by America’s political leaders. He cited case after case where public opinion was way ahead of Washington’s policies.

Rasmussen’s book is full of interesting statistics and rebuttals of prevailing Washington wisdom. Only 35% of Americans share the Republican view of cutting everything except defense. He explains that “respect and admiration for our troops exists alongside doubts about the jobs they’ve been asked to do.” He cautions that Americans are turned off by attacks on the military such as those during the Vietnam War. But attacking Washington for misuse of the military could sell very well. Washington has made commitments to defend 56 nations, but the public only supports protecting 12; indeed, only four garner over 60% support. These are Canada with 80%, England with 74%, Australia with 65%, and Israel with 60%. Half of the 12 are in Western Europe; the others include Mexico (53%), South Korea (59%), and Panama and the Bahamas (58%).

Other interesting statistics: 75% believe that no American troops should be stationed overseas except for “vital national security interests.” Only 11% support an American role as “global policeman.” The national security budget pays for 800,000 civilians in addition to the military personnel, but these people are not viewed as favorably as soldiers themselves are.

Most Americans are not isolationists. Sixty percent think America should remain involved with international institutions such as the United Nations, but 55% want us to withdraw our troops from Western Europe (only 28% support keeping them there). The author repeatedly compares the public’s thinking with that of the political class in Washington and New York. For example, he says, “no one in the political class has advocated such a policy.”

“Protect America First,” rather than “Send Americans First,” is the preferred policy by far of most voters. Troops must only be committed as a last resort and only with clear, feasible objectives. The author sees vast potential savings in a defensive rather than offensive military, as does, for example, candidate Ron Paul. Aircraft carriers, of which we have about 20 squadrons, for example, are now very vulnerable to new anti-ship weaponry. Medical insurance for veterans for life is costing some $45 billion yearly. About 700,000 men and women who served in the First Gulf War are now getting disability benefits that add up to more billions. An Air Force more focused on defense rather than offense would save tens of billions each year.

The book anticipates that only the leadership is lacking for big cuts in the Defense/Homeland Security budget and that a new candidate who is able to articulate the issues (and has military credentials, I would add) will gain vast political support in the future. I do recommend that readers actually watch Eisenhower’s farewell address about the military-industrial complex. It is an extraordinarily well-crafted and erudite speech, far, far above the kind of talks given by most politicians nowadays.

Rasmussen is especially interesting in that his polling asks the right questions. Reading his conclusions makes one wonder if most polling by the political class is actually designed to obfuscate the real beliefs of voters, which are opposed to most of what Washington does. His polling shows that voters are intelligent people when asked more profound questions. The author covers much more than just defense spending, including how voters would reform health care, corporate welfare, taxes, and so on. The constant theme is that voters are not dumb — he comments about how the political class deprecates most voters — but Washington’s system prevents logical reforms.

Here are several points:

• 69% want competition in health care and 78% of Americans want competition in coverage between insurance companies, but Washington is focused on preventing anything that would cut into the profits of the medical establishment (and the lawyers who sue them).
• 68% prefer a government with fewer services and lower taxes; just 22% want more services and higher taxes.
• 79% of mainstream voters think Americans are over-taxed.
• Voters overwhelmingly believe their so-called representatives listen more to party leaders and lobbyists than to voters in their districts; 59% believe that most are re-elected because the rules are rigged in their favor.
• 56% believe that growth in government spending should be limited yearly to reflect only the growth in population plus inflation.
• Voters overwhelmingly believe the game in Washington is a form of legalized extortion and that businesspeople give money to politicians because they’re afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t.
• The majority always vote for candidates promising to lower or not raise taxes; they are almost always betrayed by the political class of both parties.
• Whether kings or elected politicians rule, wars and crises have always been an excuse for more taxes, which then remain after the war is over. As Thomas Paine wrote, “I know not whether taxes are raised to fight wars, or wars are started in order to raise taxes.”

In summary the author’s polling shows that Americans have pretty realistic views of the world and realistic assumptions about American strengths and weaknesses. However, he may still underestimate the power of the political class to continue its rule. Wars are very profitable for many interests and an easy way to channel money from defense contractors to politicians through political donations to their re-election campaigns. (Anywhere else in the world this would be thought of as bribery). The Roman and British Empires saw vast poverty among most of their citizens (see Trade Guilds of the Latter Roman Empire). Empire was mainly supported by their “political classes” too, not the mass of their people, but then their citizens didn’t have much voice. In 19th-century England, only 4% of people could vote for parliament. Anyway, optimists can take heart from this book that America is not on the road to ruin.

Originally published by The American Conservative.

The Greatest Threat

It's Not The Muslims 

By Justin Raimondo, 
January 27, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

There’s always a Looming Danger, an Ominous Threat lurking somewhere – that’s the War Party’s bread-and-butter. Back in the day, it was the Germans, who were going to cross the Atlantic and meet their Japanese allies somewhere near the Mississippi. Then it was the Commies, who were not only in the process of swallowing Asia but supposedly had their Fifth Column right here in the US, ready willing and able to take the Capitol at a signal from the Kremlin. After that there was somehesitation in deciding just who or what would take the place of the Red Threat, but that was decided on September 11, 2001, when Osama bin Laden’s Global Caliphateemerged as the Bogeyman of the moment. It turned into quite a long moment, as we have seen, one that still lingers to this day, even after bin Laden’s death and thecrushing of al-Qaeda: Americans, being sentimentalists, hang on to their villains long after their shelf life has expired. 

That’s because these dark eminences are alluring, in their way: the narratives we construct tell us a story we can be proud of, a tale of derring-do in which the American people are made of Heroic Stuff, holding aloft the Torch of Freedom lest it be extinguished by rampaging hordes of Orcs, sacrificing their pelf, their liberty – and, often, their lives – in the name of Saving the World. 

The Threat has great value to our rulers: they cling to this narrative because it justifies their power, and their insatiable desire for more. President Barack Obama started out his recent state of the union address by invoking the Threat and holding up the military’s response to it as a shining example: 

“These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s armed forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.” 

Yes, just imagine if civil society was organized along military lines, with all of us taking orders from our commander-in-chief – what a glorious time it would be! 

Our rulers invoke these militaristic metaphors as exhortations to get us in line: we hear much about “unity,” “unselfishness,” glorification of “the mission” (whose mission?). These are the bromides uttered by tyrants and would-be tyrants, who would love to turn society into a civilian army. Their vision of the future is of a collective marching in lockstep down the road to whatever hellish fate they have in store for us. 

These days, however, they are having a harder time convincing us of the reality of the Threat. This is true for a number of reasons, but the main source of our skepticism is the overwhelming certainty that the Threat is coming not from without but from within. No, not in the presence of those Mooslims, in spite of the Israel Lobby‘s best efforts: no, not from the long-gone Commie Conspiracy or the “militias” that were thefavored bogeyman of the Clinton era. Instead, the Threat springs from something deeper, a force connected to the way our society works and has been working since the inauguration of the modern era: it is the looming threat of national bankruptcy. 

We look at Greece in default, at failing France, at Italy in arrears, and see our future: on the left and the right, the voices of panic are rising. Listen to what George Soroshas to say: 

“’At times like these, survival is the most important thing,’ he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of ‘evil.’ Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.” 

“A period of ‘evil’” – that’s what’s in store for us, says the man who broke the Bank of England and is one of the richest men on earth, an apocalyptic vision that will sweep away all we have known, and loved: 

“As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. ‘It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.’” 

On the other side of the political spectrum, we hear similar prophecies of doom, although there is nothing gleeful about Rep. Ron Paul’s reaction to his own dark vision of the future: 

"There’s going to be anger, and there’s going to be riots in the streets as well. But this is all a consequence of the fact that — why and how do governments spend like this? It’s because they don’t have sound money. When we run up deficits, we tax, but never enough. We can’t tax, it would ruin the economy. Then we borrow, and we get away with that for a long time. But we rely on the printing presses from the Federal Reserve to create the money, and that’s where the problem is."

The Pentagon agrees with the Soros-Paul scenario: the threat of an economic collapse has been in their sights since the crash of ’08. The most recent threat assessment points to “economic instability” as our rulers’ chief worry. The Army recently conducted a year-long war game dubbed “Unified Quest 2011,” centered around how to deal with a "large scale economic breakdown" in this country. 

The “threats” of the past sixty years have receded: America’s military might is unchallenged. Yet a new Threat is rising, not from without but from within – aneconomic cancer eating away at the very heart of our society. We had a taste of it in ’08, and in spite of the Obama-bots’ Pollyannaish predictions of “recovery,” ordinary people see nothing but trouble on the horizon. This is a real threat, unlike the others, one that cannot be fought by our matchless military, or even negotiated with – and it is coming. 

American’s national security is in danger, but to listen to our politicians (Paul excepted), you’d think we had nothing to worry about: it’s business as usual. Yet as dark clouds gather on the horizon, and lightning splits the sky, we shiver in our homes and wonder when and how the storm will break.

'National Debt Is Our Biggest Security Threat'

Adm. Mike Mullen

By Laura Bassett
First Posted: 06-24-10 12:00 PM
Updated: 06-24-10 03:49 PM
Courtesy Of "The Huffington Post"

America's highest-ranking military official thinks the U.S. has bigger security problems than al-Qaeda, suicide bombers and an increasingly deadly nine-year war.

"Our national debt is our biggest national security threat," said Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a "Tribute to the Troops" breakfast sponsored byThe Hill on Thursday morning, according to two staffers at the gathering. He also noted a troubling trend -- that veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are becoming homeless at four times the rate the country witnessed in the wake of Vietnam.

Mullen's national security analysis may sound off the wall, but a large number of Americans agree, according to a recent Gallup poll. Gallup reports that terrorism and federal government debt are tied as the most worrisome perceived threats to Americans, with healthcare costs ranking a close third. Only 26 percent of Americans polled deemed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to be "extremely serious" threats to the future well-being of the U.S., compared with four in ten who ranked the national debt at that level.