Vic Socotra

23 January 2009

Off-Limits

(Off limits- File photo of another war)

A pal of mine is still in the government. He has a responsibility to look south of the border and keep track of what is going on. He gets to play with real toys, and has real problems. He is more than a little concerned about safety and security.

I envy I don’t. I am stuck up here worrying about the real estate assessment- it’s down again, dammit- and trying to read the portents of what is to come based on what the new people are saying.

The new stimulus package? Shoot, it appears to be chock-full of the usual feel-good crap the Congress always has tucked into bills. It may not be pork, precisely, or rather, is all pork without an integrated plan. It is not the strategic investment the President has been talking about for two years.

I understand there is money to address the shortage of nurses- I am not sure how that impacts unemployment, unless we have a whole bunch of new prospective students. The crisis in the yacht construction business has, of course, been a huge concern, and that is fixed in the bill, and we will pour more money down the rat-hole of Medicare, weather-proof some houses and assorted other job training projects.

I have not read the proposed legislation, but trust me, none of the members of Congress have either.

There is nothing like a bold plan in all of this. It is a hodge-podge of $825 billion dollars worth of disassociate junk.

I know, I know, let’s give the President some slack. I am pulling for him, and I want him to succeed. But there is nothing like the Moon Shot in this, or the interstate highway system, or something cool, like a bridge from Pensacola to New Orleans so no one will have to drive in Alabama.

Between the stop-gap trillion dollars the old regime threw at stimulus, and this most of a trillion, we are about two annual budgets in the hole already, and whatever the big deal yet to come is going to have to sit on top of it.

One columnist this morning claimed the tab for each new job created is $233,000. I don’t know about that, though the number is awfully close to the one that we used to use as the back-of-the-envelope total cost of a "full time equivalent" contract government worker. Wouldn’t you think we could figure out a better way to divvy that up in direct payments?

Of course it is irritating. Everything seems to be these days. The assessment I got from the County last week told me I have lost just about $90 thousand on Tunnel 8. I don’t know about you, but taking the public and private debt together, I am screwed.

It could be worse, of course, regardless of how idiotic this mess is, and what the boneheads in the Congress are going to shovel up to the White House for Mr. Obama’s signature in the next couple weeks.

Take a deep breath and look at what we have bought so far, and then hope that the smart guys figure out something decent and lasting to try.

We are still pretty safe, I think, or at least no one has whacked us in a while. What is happening in Mexico ought to be enough to get our attention, though it is not. We are preoccupied.

Part of it is leaking out. The Marines just put Tijuana off limits to their personnel. I remember the Monday morning meetings at the Third Fleet Headquarters, and the litany of lunacy that would be read off by the JAG officer on what had happened to the sailors and jar-heads on the Avenido del Revolucione.

Admiral Herb Browne used to say that nothing good ever happened after midnight, and with the young kids driving seventy miles to fuel up on tequila, and then weaving back north, assuming they were lucky enough to make it to the border.

That was in the late 1990s. I remember how deep the problem was, decades before that, working at the Fleet headquarters . My old skipper from the USS Midway was an old-school pilot named E. Inman Carmichael. He was a great guy, callsign “Hoagy,” after the tin-pan alley composer. As a consolation prize for not making Admiral, they gave Hoagy command of NAVBASE San Diego, which had responsibility for all the Navy Department property and activities in that lovely Navy town.

He was uncomfortable with the number of violent incidents that were happening south of the border, and announced in one of his staff meetings that he was going to put Mexico “off limits.”

One of his personnel people at the table squirmed a bit, and then timidly suggested that might be difficult, since nearly a quarter of his sailors had to live there, because it was too expensive to rent in America.

Hoagy had to back down and let the sailors go home at night across the border. Today, though, the idea has come around again, and Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland, Commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, just placed Mexico off limits. He considers it too dangerous for his 44,000 troops, most of whom now have multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is right, of course. What is going on in Mexico is as close to bloody anarchy as anything we have seen in this hemisphere short of declared war.

Tijuana is out of control, though it does not hold a candle to what is going on next to El Paso, in Ciudad Benito Juárez.

More than 1,550 people were killed there in drug shoot-outs, carjackings and armed robberies. Think about it. This is happening just on the other side of a little muddy stream in the desert. Right next door.

Just why Mexico is failing is open to come interpretation. I don’t have any particular expertise in that; better-informed people than me say it is because of the decision by Presidente Felipe Calderon in 2006 to crack down on drug dealers. The Bush Administration egged him on, as part of the War on Drugs, the one that has been going on far longer than the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They say the crack-down produced vicious unintended consequences. By smashing the larger drug-distribution networks south of the border, they opened up competition to anyone violent enough to stake out some turf.

Things are quiet on the American side not because of our superb law enforcement, but rather, because the cartels are intact and still enforce order.

The last time I was in Juárez, I had a great time. The streets were alive with tourists, and soldier from Ft Bliss across the border. They say it is dark now, and lit at night by firefights. Back then, the Army only placed certain establishments off limits if they were trouble.

Now we have placed the whole country off limits.

It seems to me there might be a bold vision that the new President might take, and that is to eliminate the profit margin that fuels the murder, something the El Paso City Council has already recommended: legalize, regulate and tax the drug trade.

That is way too bold, though, and addresses something truthfully. I doubt that anyone is ready to take a step that recognizes the drug problem in Mexico is not theirs, but ours.

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