TheAgitator.com
The Other Militarization
Sunday, January 4th, 2009Gene Healy and Benjamin Friedman have a good piece in the Orange County Register on the recent announcement that the military will be deploying three military brigades for domestic missions.
6 Responses to “The Other Militarization”
Leave a Reply
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Maybe they’ll be used to ensure civility in the coffee lines at McDonald’s.
Good one, David.
With all the stories linked on this blog to the militarization of state, county and municipal police departments across America, I wonder just how much it matters that the military wants in on the act.
Don’t forget, this is America — no one does much about anything anymore.
First it was one brigade. With all manner of fancy ‘crowd control’ microwave weapons. Now it’s three? WTF?
The commenter, on that link, made me quite scared when he started talking about fighting drug cartels. The Mexican army has done so well by getting the army involved! What was it,now? 5600 Mexican people killed! Though I have to admit, it was not the military that was being blamed for most of those deaths! My take on the subject is that they could be considered an indirect participant in escalating the drug war violence in Mexico!? And, an indirect cause for so many people having been killed. More than the entire Iraqi occupation?
Michael, it’s classic ‘mission creep’ all over again. I saw this crap back when I was a Fed civ servant in the early 1990’s; all the military branches and Fed LEO agencies were looking for some way to maintain themselves after the Soviet Union collapsed, and presto! all of a sudden the War on (Some) Drugs was substituted.
But the problem is and always has been that if you try to see the cartels as military targets, you find yourself facing what amounts to an insurgency that is both extraordinarily well funded and nearly invisible…until they strike. It’s literally like what Mao said about fishes in the sea.
And as Mexico has illustrated, try to ‘fight’ this as if it were a ‘real’ war, and watch the bodies of innocents start piling up as well as that of the cartellistas. ‘Collateral damage’, don’t you know? But all fine and dandy so long as all those big-shot contractors keep sucking off the taxpayer’s life’s-blood courtesy of arms purchases made by Uncle to ‘fight drugs’. Talk about ‘workfare’!
The planned use of those troops is very likely in violation of the posse comitatus act and we should be arresting the president for even attempting to deploy them in such a manner, but there’s no way that will ever happen.