Peter Krupa

(via BoingBoing)

Jorge Castañeda published a nifty little piece in Foreign Policy on why Mexico’s drug war is ill-advised and unwinnable:

The Mexican drug war is costly, unwinnable, and predicated on dangerous myths. Calderón has deployed everything from distorted statistics to bad history as weapons to convince the country, and the world, that the war must be joined.

Fair enough, but that being the case, now what? You can’t just say, “Never mind” and withdraw the troops. The cartels are broken up and at war with each other, some $30 billion in illegal cash is crossing the border every year, and Americans are still hoovering up vast amounts of ski, recession and bonus reductions notwithstanding.

It’s only a matter of time before the extreme violence honed in Mexico crosses the border. In some cases it already has. (Did you know when they dissolve a body in acid, Mexican gangsters call it a pozole? Ha!) I don’t have any answers. Violence just has a way of spreading.

If you travel to Uganda, throw a big conference, and present yourself as an expert on homosexuality; and if you tell a bunch of religious and political leaders that homosexuals are a “movement” that is part of an “evil institution” that involves “sodomizing” teens, stalking and “recruiting” children, and destroying families; that homosexuals can turn the gay off if they choose, and when they don’t it’s because they probably like being a threat to decent heterosexual civilization; if you do all this, and then your conference attendees believe you so thoroughly that they go home and pass a law that punishes homosexual behavior with hanging, and you say, “That wasn’t my intention…”

Then what was your intention, exactly?