Obama Weighs Military Options in Mexico

• The drug war in Mexico is escalating. There are real doubts the  Mexican government can handle it victoriously. With a population well over 100 million, the collapse of Mexico can destabilize the entire North America. America will be affected greatly.
   
• Alex Johnson comments In Mexico’s drug wars, fears of a U.S. front :
   
  With U.S. forces fighting two wars abroad, the nation’s top military officer made an important visit last week to forestall a third. He went to Mexico.
   
  Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the trip to confer with Mexican leaders about the Merida Initiative, a three-year plan signed into law last June to flood the U.S.-Mexican border region with $1.4 billion in U.S. assistance for law-enforcement training and equipment, as well as technical advice and training to bolster Mexico’s judicial system. 
    
  The assistance is intended to help Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa step up his war against drug cartels. The drug lords and their soldiers are blamed for having killed more than 6,300 people since January 2008, including more than 1,000 in the first two months of this year alone.
   
  That’s about 100 people every week for the last 14 months. The cartels usually do not target civilians, but dozens, perhaps hundreds, have died in the crossfire.  “It’s a real war,” says Jorge Ramos, mayor of Tijuana, Mexico, across the border with San Diego. “We’re not faking.”
   
  The point of the U.S. initiative is not just to quell the violence in Mexico. More important for the Obama administration, it is to keep the violence from spilling across the border more than it already has, especially in the border states of Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. The concern is very real. Mexican drug cartels already control about 90 percent of the cocaine trade across the United States and most of the market for marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin, with operations in 230 cities, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center. They have essentially supplanted the Colombian and Dominican criminal groups that terrorized major U.S. cities through the 1980s and ’90s, the agency said. 
     …….
  Texas pleads for U.S. troops
  Now, to hear Texas Gov. Rick Perry tell it, U.S. resources are being focused too much on Mexico and not enough on Americans on this side of the border.
   
  Last month, Perry called on the Department of Homeland Security to send 1,000 troops to the U.S. side of the border. Complaining that the federal government had not done enough to protect Americans in the border region, Perry dismissed potential constitutional concerns about assigning active-duty U.S. personnel to military operations inside the United States, saying bluntly, “I really don’t care.”
   
  Similar fears are taking root in Arizona, where law-enforcement officials last month urged the Legislature to dedicate more state resources to protecting communities in the border region. The Mexican city of Sonora, they said, was emerging as a central battleground just across the border.
      
  “This is organized crime,” Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard testified before a state Senate panel. “The enemy we are combating is extremely well organized, extremely disciplined and extremely well trained.”
   
  Nor is the threat merely regional. The National Drug Intelligence Center lists 230 U.S. cities in 45 states where the drug trade is controlled by Mexican cartels. Many are concentrated along the Mexican border, of course: 30 in Texas, 27 in California and nine in Arizona, for example. But the center also lists 22 cities in Washington state and five in Idaho. With their long unprotected northern border, the states are a prime gateway for cartel-affiliated drug smugglers into Western Canada.
   
  Twelve cities in North and South Carolina, where large Latino immigrant populations fuel the states’ textile industries, are on the list. So are eight in Ohio. In Alabama, which has six cities on the list, Shelby County Sheriff Chris Curry said investigators believed that the torture-murders in August of five men in Birmingham were linked to Mexican-controlled drug operations.
    
  “It was clear to me that I was not fishing in a Shelby County pond,” Curry said. The list even includes three cities in Hawaii and one in Alaska.
   
  “The fact that they have taken over the drug trade in North America is one thing, but what they have done is they are proliferating throughout the United States,” said Fleming, the author of “Drug Wars.”
   
  “You can look at the drug problem, and that’s one facet of it,” he said. “But when you start having narco terrorists operating on U.S. soil with the abilities that these organizations have, you have now instituted a tremendous threat to the national security structure of our country.” 
   
• There is no doubt the fighting will spill over into America. This will be the beginning of a new war for America. The real intent is the merger of Mexico and America followed by Canada ie the North American Union (NAU) as defined in the SPP (Security & Prosperity Partnership).
   
• So, what is President Obama’s next step in this brewing crisis? Mark my words it will be a military ‘assistance’ option, sending US troops into the fray. Anne Gearan reports in Mullen offers Mexico update to Obama :
    
  President Barack Obama was briefed Saturday by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen about the drug wars in Mexico and wanted to know how the United States can help.
   
  “Clearly one of the things the president was interested in was the U.S military capability that may or may not apply to our cooperation with the Mexicans,” said a U.S. military official who requested anonymity because the discussions were private. “He was very interested in what kind of military capabilities may be applied.”
   
  Mullen briefed Obama on Saturday morning about discussions with Mexican military leaders about the drug wars there. Mullen, who was in Mexico on Friday, has referred to the recent spike in violence as a crisis. Mullen has said Mexico could borrow from U.S. tactics in the fight against terrorism as it battles a crisis of drug-related violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
   
  On Saturday, the military official said the additional U.S. help could come in the form of U.S. equipment and intelligence-sharing. “We’re already sharing information with the Mexican military and have been looking for ways to expand that particularly in the realm of intelligence,” the official said.
   
• Now you understand why the Federal government has never been keen to defend the integrity of American border with Mexico. You also understand why the Feds have been lax in enforcing illegal immigration laws especially with regards to Mexicans. We will see the eventual merger of the 2 countries soon. See also:
    
  Texas Makes Emergency Plans In Case Violence Spills Over From Mexico
  Mexico Declares Martial Law!!
  Mexico Collapsing into Drug Wars !

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