Vic Socotra

08 January 2009

South of the Border

(The Fence)

With the battle raging in Gaza, it is hard not to think of fences, and intractable problems and sorrow. There is no solution I am aware of to that situation, except that we are tethered to the problem by history as surely as the Palestinians and Israelis are shackled to it by their dead.

When I think of fences and problems, though, I have to think about ours, and whether it could wind up the same way.

The last time I saw General Barry McCaffery he was retired from military life and was surrounded by pilot fish as strode boldy across the impressive parquet marble floors of the Old Executive Office Building. His hair was still close-cropped and he radiated an aura of purpose.

He was the Drug Czar then. It is an odd title, the Czar thing. It is applied normally to hopeless and thankless tasks that demand attention but have no solution. Appointing a Czar is a way for an Administration to appear to have done something significant while sidestepping responsibility, deferring necessary action and deflecting blame.

I did not feel sorry for the General. He had parlayed a fine combat performance asa commander of the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in DESERT STORM into a four-star rocket ride through the Army firmament of stars. He was assistant to JCS Chairman Colin Powell after the war, and I used to see him down on the first floor of the building when I would slip out to smoke a cigarette at the River Entrance.

On a trip to the White House he happened to bump into the young Dee Dee Myers, Press Secretary to the early Clinton Administration. It was shortly after the disastrous attempt to integrate Gays into the military. Lift-off on the rocket ride began when Myers icily told the general that she “did not speak to the military.” She went unidentified for years after that, and the context of the remark may be accurate or not, but it did not matter. When the anecdote began to fly around the E-Ring of the Pentagon, the Building went on high alert.

To defuse the situation, the General became a jogging buddy of the President, and in short order, a four-star general. He wound up as the Commander in Chief of the Southern Command, which then was still headquartered in Panama, in what had been the Canal Zone. He would have been a fine Chairman, but the last thing the Clintons desired at the Pentagon was a man of substance after their buzz-saw encounters with national hero Colin Powell.

In the up-or-out world of the military, there was no place for McCaffrey to go when he finished his tour in Panama.

Mr. Clinton, for all his flaws, is one of the most gifted politicians who ever occupied the Oval Office. In Barry McCaffrey he saw a man of purpose, ambition and discipline, almost the inverse image of the President. He was perfect for an issue-area where the Clinton’s had weakness: the war on drugs. The President may not have inhaled, but there were persistent rumors about his brother’s drug use, and allegations from the vast right wing conspiracy that there had been some strange overseas business at the airport at Mena, Arkansas, during the time Clinton was governor of the state.

McCaffrey was the perfect Czar for the War on Drugs, bulletproof on the issue that has never addressed the central enemy at all, which of course is the citizenry of the United States, a significant percentage of whom persist despite harsh laws in smoking pot and snorting cocaine. As SOUTHCOM Commander, he had extensive connections with the leadership of Latin America, and a hands-on feeling for how the mountains of drugs were moved into the US.

Upon retirement from the military in 1996, General McCaffrey was confirmed by unanimous vote of the Senate to be Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), where he served with distinction, if little success, until the inauguration of George W. Bush. He may have been a figurehead, a hood ornament, if you will, but he did coordinate the $19 billion dollars spent each year on the activities that make up the drug control budget.

Although he was no longer the Drug Czar, the General stayed with the Government. At West Point (he was class of ’64, his father ’39) he became an adjunct professor and made a series of extremely high-visibility trips to the combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His trenchant and accurate assessments are worth a read, and that is how this was supposed to start out, since he recently was down in Mexico, and what he reported is enough to scare you silly.

That is the point, of course, since this is the time to influence the course of the next Administration, before it really begins. That is also the reason that the party apparatchiks put some torpedoes into the McCaffrey legend last month, accusing him of business improprieties and influence peddling.

It is nonsense, of course, but he is a Defense Democrat and a tough guy, and they had to keep him away from a significant post with real power in the Obama Administration.

In his report on meetings held around the summit of the International Forum of Intelligence and Security Specialists, the General noted that what is happening in Mexico is “as severe as terror-related violence in Afghanistan.” He was blunt about it. He said that if any nation provided support to an insurrection here in the way commercial interests in Texas and Arizona are doing for the Mexican drug thugs, we would treat it as an act of war.

The full report is floating around out there and is worth a read if you want to see another one of the sea of troubles we are going to have to deal with. The insatiable demand for drugs inside the US is turning the rest of the hemisphere upside down, and it is a market that is not affected by economic slow-down. In fact, demand actually increases for a lot of products.

I haven’t been south of the border in a few years, not since I lived in San Diego, where a wrong turn on I-5 put you quickly in Tijuana. But the memory of the Fence and the Border Police, seen from both sides, is etched in memory.

It is worse now. A pal of mine completed an epic motorcycle ride around the perimeter of the continental United States last summer. He is doing the first draft of the book about it, and his account of riding east across the desert hit my desk about the same time General McCaffrey’s report did.

My pal summed it up this way, thundering along on his Harley Soft Tail:

“We were well north of town when we saw up high in the far distance the dark outline of a motionless INS aerostat or tethered blimp chockfull of sensors. More than 60 miles from the border from Mexico, we had stumbled smack dab into the middle of a war zone. The battlefield was in the middle of the Yuma Proving Ground along US route 95. Our outnumbered anti-immigration troops attempted to even the battle with force-multiplying, technical virtuosity...Several miles later, abeam Castle Dome Peak at the head of a narrow canyon, we slowed down in the dawn light to pass through an immigration control point. US forces meant business. My eyes spotted our fatigue-wearing warriors heavily armed with holstered side arms and shouldered M16s. They silently waved us through the checkpoint. We waved back and wished them well.”

The General put it this way: “The Mexican State is engaged in an increasingly violent, internal struggle against heavily armed narco-criminal cartels that have intimidated the public, corrupted much of law enforcement, and created an environment of impunity to the law.” He maintains that thousands are being murdered each year, with drug-related assassinations and kidnapping rampant throughout Mexico. Squad-sized units of the police and Army are being butchered, and their bodies left on display as a warning to the public. He says the whole 2,000 mile land border is contaminated, and that tendrils of the malevolent violence reach into almost three hundred US cities.

The Times this morning has an article that says Mike Chertoff, outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security, has advised incoming Secretary-designate Janet Napolitano <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/janet_napolitano/index.html?inline=nyt-per> of Arizona, to put “helping Mexico get control of its borders and organized crime problems” at the very top of the list of national security concerns.

Sounds like a good idea. My question is where the resources are going to come from to do that. It occurs to me that maybe a frank discussion about where the homeland security problem really begins might go right along with it.

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