I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at ScottHorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
You guys on the line, I've got Ted Galen Carpenter.
He is a senior fellow, of course, at the Cato Institute and a regular contributor at Antiwar.com, and you know what?
I couldn't possibly keep track.
What's your latest book, Ted?
The latest book that came out is NATO the Dangerous Dinosaur.
Great.
And that is your what number-eth book?
That was book number 12.
I do have book number 13 in preparation.
That will be out sometime next spring.
The title of that is Unreliable Watchdog, the News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy.
All right.
Man, you're good.
All right.
So let's talk about this awesome thing that you wrote for Responsible Statecraft, the Quincy Institute here.
It's ResponsibleStatecraft.org, and I'm fairly certain we ran it at Antiwar.com, although I might have been traveling at the time.
But this is so good, and it's something that I wish I knew everything about and is such a weak spot of mine.
Really, all of Latin America, everything is such a weak spot of mine.
But the bloodbath in Mexico is what it's called, another gift of U.S. drug and drone wars.
So outlawing cocaine and heroin and pot has not worked.
Is that what you're concluding here?
That sounds pretty wild.
That is a shocking conclusion.
But after due examination and four decades of experience, I think it's impossible to reach any other conclusion.
We've not only inflicted tremendous harm on our own society by our political leaders adopting that prohibition policy, but the United States government is inflicting great harm on other countries and other societies, including our next door neighbor in Mexico that has created enormous problems of corruption and violence for the people of Mexico.
Just think of the ignorance and credulity that you would have to have to think that just somehow with this nation of 300 million people, some significant, you know, two digit percentage of which consume illegal drugs, that government by wishing it so or making it so or producing enough truncheons and jail cells could somehow just suppress that demand and make it go away here or could somehow intervene in a place like Mexico or Peru or wherever else and eradicate the supply and drive the people who are involved in the business with that much demand out of existence.
I mean, you'd have to have magic, but there's no magic.
Instead, you just have government power.
And what do you think's going to happen?
A bunch of cops are going to shoot a bunch of people.
Prices go up and people abuse drugs anyway.
Yeah, there's no magic involved.
And I keep wondering whether the people in power who keep pushing prohibition policies actually believe there is a potential for those policies to work.
If we just apply more time and resources, if they're really that naive or they know perfectly well what they're doing, that the policies aren't going to work.
But it creates great careers for these individuals.
It creates tremendous budgets and missions for vested interests and the government agencies that are implementing these policies.
I think it's more likely the latter, but I've talked to enough proponents of drug prohibition to believe that at least some really have drunk the Kool-Aid and they actually believe that with just enough effort, a little more time, a little more money, a little more in the way of creative programs to suppress supply, to discourage demand, that somehow this strategy will work.
Never mind that we tried the same strategy with alcohol in the 1920s and early 1930s.
That didn't work either.
That caused enormously destructive side effects, unintended consequences, just as drug prohibition has done.
But they fail to learn from history.
We keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over.
Yeah.
Well, you know what the problem is, and we're going to talk about the destruction of Mexico more in a minute, but just in the minds of the American people, what we're faced with here, and especially as you identify them, the government employees with a stake in the thing, is the opposite is unthinkable.
You know, legalized drugs, why that would quintuple supply overnight and drug abuse would be rampant and everyone would just beat their wife and die of an overdose and everything would go to hell.
And what kind of message does that send to the kids that the government says it's okay to do heroin and cocaine now?
Are you crazy?
I mean, pot's one thing, Ted, but you don't seem like the degenerate type, but you're willing to allow America to spiral into total drug-induced self-destruction.
I know that's what right-leaning people think and feel about it.
I hear them say it.
And I could understand their point of view from what they know and understand about how these things work.
But I don't know.
What do you say to that?
Well, that's the mythology that has existed, that has dominated policy for decades.
It's utterly false.
And we have substantive evidence that it's false.
Portugal thoroughly decriminalized all drug use nearly two decades ago.
And what did we find when they did that?
Drug use actually went down.
Crimes, especially violent crimes, went down.
We heard the same warnings about dire consequences when Colorado and other states began to legalize recreational marijuana.
Oh, we were going to see a spike in crime.
We're going to see a huge spike in drug use.
We were going to see a huge spike in auto accidents because people were operating motor vehicles while high.
None of that happened.
And yet you find prohibition proponents still repeating that mythology as though it has not been thoroughly debunked by evidence.
And it's time for them to stop fostering these kinds of destructive myths.
They need to face reality.
They need to start telling the truth.
And you know, we could kind of use some of their arguments back against them as far as what kind of message does it send when every once in a while a wholly innocent person gets shot or falsely imprisoned or, you know, a family is destroyed.
People spend sometimes decades in prison.
They go in there for a short while on drug possession, but then get in a fight in there and get their time extended, die in there.
You know, not of old age, but of a stabbing or whatever, over some pot or over some cocaine.
And I guess, see, here's the thing, too, right, is pot really is trivial.
And when everybody smokes pot, nothing bad happens.
Nothing.
It's, you know, but people can really ruin their lives with the hard stuff.
And so that's, you know, part of it.
Part of the problem, too, is it's hard to confront that.
I remember, bad example, Ted, but when Bob Barr was running for president, they said to him on Fox News, as a libertarian, I mean, back in 08 or, yeah, in 08, they said, well, look, OK, pot's one thing, but you don't mean to legalize hard drugs, you and these crazy libertarians.
And he went, oh, no, no, no, no, of course not.
And in fact, as a former federal prosecutor, he'd have been the best guy to make the case for legalization if he had had the courage to do it.
But he didn't have the courage to.
And that was what it came down to.
You could see him shrink in his chair.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
We're not saying that because that's just sounds too crazy to soccer mom's ears.
And they wouldn't know how to explain that.
Oh, yeah.
No, our heroin problem would be much less worse if we would legalize it.
That just sounds too counterintuitive to people.
They can't really think it through in steps.
It just sounds like you're saying heroin for everyone.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things they're doing is conflating a public health problem, which with hard drugs is very real with a law enforcement issue that you can deal with a public health problem by throwing people in prison.
Well, that's utter nonsense.
And we learned that that wasn't a solution well over a half century ago with respect to alcoholics.
And there's no question alcoholism is a very serious public health problem.
It remains one, whether it was under prohibition or under our current legalized system.
But you don't solve that problem by putting alcoholics in prison.
It just makes matters a lot worse.
We learned the lesson that putting drug users in prison did not work with alcoholics.
We have yet to learn that lesson with respect to currently illegal hard drugs.
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All right, so now, most things in the world are George W. Bush's fault, including this, and I don't know all about it, but I know it was him that told the Mexicans, listen, we demand that you crack down.
There's a bunch of money and guns, and as far as I know, Green Berets to lead them, but we want your military to go to war against these drug cartels.
Instead of smashing all the Mexican drug cartels, what happened, Ted?
Well, Bush gave that, I don't want to say order, but a strong suggestion to Mexico's President Felipe Calderon in 2006.
For the next six years in his administration, Calderon did wage a very vigorous war on drugs, putting the military in charge of that effort.
What happened was violence soared enormously, and when his successor finally backed off a bit from that strategy, the violence leveled off and even ebbed a bit.
Then about five years ago, the United States and Mexico scored a great victory in the war on drugs.
They managed to finally apprehend Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa cartel that controlled about half the trade in Mexico.
Well, what happened after this great drug war victory was that the trade fragmented further, turf fights renewed with special vehemence, and the level of violence today is more than twice what it was under Felipe Calderon and his drug war.
That is how the situation in Mexico has really spiraled out of control.
We are witnessing a level of violence in our southern neighbor that ought to be worrisome, I think, to all Americans.
This is not something we want to see, this kind of violence and instability in a country directly next door.
That's what's happened largely because of US policy.
Is it really any kind of exaggeration to say that this has been, at least in some times and places here, what you'd call ultra-violence with ISIS-style beheadings and assassinations of reporters and mass intimidation of towns and just the total corruption of police and military agencies in a way that, I mean, you couldn't really get much worse than this if you were trying to do it to them, to destroy them out of resentment somehow, you know?
Mexico is not quite a failed state yet, but it's exhibiting some of the characteristics of a failed state.
Just one example, in the months leading up to the legislative elections in Mexico this summer, over three dozen candidates for office were assassinated.
I mean, imagine if this was happening in any other country where the United States took an interest.
I think these would be headlines in the major media outlets almost every day, and yet that is kind of the normal background of violence in Mexico.
We see the cartels dominating significant portions of the country where effectively the cartels are the authority, not the Mexican government.
That's the situation that we're witnessing in Mexico today, and that's not very comforting.
Yeah.
All right, so do I have it right that the Zetas started out as an anti-drug hit squad within the Mexican military, and they just decided, hey, we can make more money being the guys we're taking out here, and took over that, and that then the CIA and I don't know whoever else were backing the Sinaloa cartel in order to try to counter them, and this would be going back to late Bush and early Obama years if I have it right, or I don't know.
I know you know a lot more about it than me.
That's generally correct.
The Zetas started off as an enforcement arm of the Mexican military dedicated to going after drug traffickers, received extensive training and equipment from the United States, and you're exactly right.
Officers of that unit decided we can do a lot better financially working for the cartels rather than fighting them, so they joined as the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel.
A few years later, they decided, you know what?
If we went into business ourselves as a drug trafficking cartel instead of just being the enforcers for an existing cartel, we can make even more money.
Yeah, cut out the middleman.
And now, apparently, what the U.S. government has done is after its romance with the Sinaloa cartel, there really did seem to be an implicit arrangement that we would encourage the Mexican government to go after Sinaloa's rivals, but largely except for a few shows of force, leave the Sinaloa cartel alone.
That blew up as a strategy when Joaquin Guzman was captured, El Chapo.
And when the turf fights blew out, then the U.S. was faced with another dilemma.
Ultimately, U.S. officials have opted for training some of the cartel enforcers with respect to cartels that seem more cooperative than most of their opponents.
I mean, this is grasping at straws if this really is U.S. strategy.
That point has not yet been confirmed, but there are strong indications that that is what Washington is doing.
Yeah.
So talk about those indications, because I read, I clicked through that link and I read about half of that thing.
Something else there.
Yeah, there's there's no doubt that Washington thinks that certain cartels are more amenable to being responsible.
It's like making a deal with one organized crime group in the United States and feeling that, yeah, we'll hold our noses.
We know that they're going to engage in brutality.
They're going to engage in a lot of corruption.
But at least this restores some stability to the situation rather than letting a full fledged turf fights constantly go on.
That's apparently the logic that American officials are using.
However, again, as the history with the Zetas show, these truces, these arrangements have a tendency to break down, particularly whenever the profit potential seems very, very high.
And there is no sign that the turf fights in Mexico are dying down at all.
If anything, they're getting somewhat worse.
And so that's the situation we're now confronting.
They're also becoming much more innovative.
In that article, I discuss the use of drones to attack Mexican security forces.
Well, after that article appeared, there was a significantly larger incident in which a whole swarm of drones were involved.
So the Mexican cartels learned from the U.S. use of drone warfare.
The cartels are still operating at a less sophisticated level, but they're employing very small drones to attack their opponents, to attack Mexican police and military.
And so this becomes an element in what is fast emerging as a full fledged civil war in Mexico.
OK, so if I did a coup d'etat and overthrew the U.S. government and declared myself the dictator and told the Mexicans, I demand that you legalize all drugs and the trade in them or I'll invade you, something like that.
That's what an American president would do.
Right.
I mean, the threat part.
And then they did that and they said, all right, that's it.
The Americans are going to nuke us if we don't completely legalize drugs.
That Horton guy is completely loco.
And so they give in and they do that.
Then what does that look like?
How does that solve our problem here, Ted?
Well, assuming the United States also legalized all drugs, we would see the trade gradually migrate into the hands of legal businesses, businesses that are not inclined to use violence to secure their trade.
And we would see the overall crime rate in the United States decline, the overall violent crime rate decline dramatically.
However, I do want to point out that once violence prone criminal organizations are entrenched.
Thoroughly, as they are in Mexico, even if we legalized all drugs, even if Mexico legalized all drugs, those criminal organizations are not going to disappear overnight.
They have acquired a great deal of power.
They have exploited some other sources of revenue, such as stealing oil supplies, tapping oil pipelines, kidnapping for ransom, extortion and so on.
So just as organized crime still exists in the United States and would exist even absent drug prohibition, drug prohibition merely makes that problem worse.
It greatly empowers those organizations, but they still would exist.
They would still cause some problems, even with a legalized system with regard to drugs.
Once they've acquired that kind of power, it does not disappear overnight.
It declines under a legalized system, but it does not disappear.
Yeah, in fact, that's the most convincing argument for keeping drugs at least mildly illegal and in the black market was to give criminals something to do rather than just mugging people, you know, which is a worse way for us, for them to make money.
Yeah, unfortunately, it perpetuates the problem.
It doesn't really solve it to to go down that route.
The legalization requires biting the bullet and the short term pain is going to be significant.
It's not a panacea to legalize drugs, but it's certainly a much, much better system than what we have now.
Yeah, and it's taken the drug war to make it this way, and that part is totally unavoidable.
It's about as bad as you can make it at this point, it sounds like.
And then, you know, the officials took a bad strategy and made it worse and worse and worse.
And then this goes to the point about the crisis of immigration here, too, where we have essentially this massive pro-immigration program in the form of the drug wars and right wing backed, you know, U.S. backed coups in Latin America still to this day, like it's the old days still, which I guess it still is.
And then all the refugees that come from that and then all of the, frankly, totalitarian type programs against the immigrants at the border.
I was just reading a thing about these kiddos locked up in this thing and they are there, locked up in this thing and they are there, you know, under 14 or 15 in in absolute deaths of despair, locked in these pens for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not committing a crime, but just for being essentially refugees from America's foreign policy.
And so why does it have to be this way at all when it doesn't have to be this way?
The hell are we doing?
And there's no question, one of the reasons for the mass migration from Central America.
Is the the presence primarily of the Mexican cartels who moved a lot of their operations into Central America when Calderon cracked down in Mexico.
Again, that didn't solve the problem of drug trafficking.
When he did that, they just moved to easier locations where they were under less pressure.
Well, what that did was thoroughly destabilize the already fragile societies in Central America, the level of violence soared, the level of corruption soared.
And what you have are legions of very desperate people wanting to get away from that, which is absolutely understandable.
They seek refuge in the United States.
They seek opportunity in the United States.
And so many of them, I mean, the families have been interviewed, families, especially with teenage boys who say, you know, we had to leave because otherwise our kids were going to be drafted in to the cartel enforcement armies.
They would either volunteer to do that, in which case they're involved in thoroughgoing corruption or they refuse to do it, which is likely to be killed.
So faced with that choice, we came north.
And what we see at the border is the unwelcome act that the United States government has put out.
The United States government didn't maybe create the problems in Central America, but it certainly exacerbated them.
And now when we see the results of that policy, we don't want to face the consequences.
Yeah.
You know, I read before, Ted, tell me if this is right, that the gang MS-13, which is, I gather, a relatively dangerous gang, a Mexican gang in the United States now, that they are, I'm not sure, actually Mexican, maybe they're, that's not right, they're Salvadoran, right?
Yeah.
So they were refugees from Reagan's interventions down there in the 80s and came to Los Angeles.
And then they were, of course, there was the entire drug culture and gang culture of South Central L.A. that was based on Reagan's foreign policy and Freeway Ricky Ross selling all that contra cocaine while at the same time Reagan was cracking down his war on drugs against it all.
And, you know, all the horror show that came from that.
But then Bill Clinton came to power and deported all of these guys and sent them home to El Salvador after they'd been thoroughly inculcated in Bloods and Crips type culture and or whatever Latin gangs in L.A.
And so then they went down there and they found that they were the most powerful force around and, you know, really grew into their own and became the threat that they are now.
Is that more than an old wives tale there?
It's it's basically accurate.
And, you know, I've described U.S. foreign policy generally as one of an eagle in the China shop where the eagle just flaps his wings around, jumps around, smashing everything in sight and seems oblivious to the effects.
And if there is a region where the United States has done that to the greatest extent, I would say the Mexico and Central America.
It is just greatly exacerbated social, political problems, the level of violence, the level of corruption.
The United States has been the worst enemy of the societies in that region.
Yeah, over and over again.
And you know what?
It really is just like with the Middle East policy, the language barrier.
I guess it's the same thing for dealing with the Ruskies and the Chinese and everybody else is U.S. ians like myself.
I'm a Texan.
I can't understand a word.
Any of these crazy people are saying.
I listen to my wife speak Russian with her family and I can't make hide her hair of any of it.
All I know is spasiva and yet.
And and it's the same thing with Spanish, you know, skateboarding muy bueno, you know, taco supreme, as Beavis and Butthead said.
And so there's just a total communication breakdown.
And just like in the case of the Middle East wars and everything else, TV never tells us what the hell is going on.
So unless people are reading Ted Carpenter at Responsible Statecraft dot org, they're just completely missing the narrative.
It doesn't even exist in the public discussion.
Well, there's something even a little worse than that, U.S. officials simply don't listen.
They have their assumptions, they stick to those assumptions through thick and thin.
And even when leaders of other societies point out the folly of the policies that Washington is pursuing, U.S. leaders simply don't listen.
And often there are vested interests in the United States pushing in the other direction to reinforce those misguided policies.
So that makes matters even worse.
But U.S. officials are tone deaf when it comes to the grievances of other societies about U.S. policies.
Absolutely tone deaf.
All right, you guys, well, that is Ted Carpenter, he is senior fellow at the Cato Institute and now a regular contributor at Antiwar.com as well.
And again, you can find this article at Responsible Statecraft dot org.
It's called Bloodbath in Mexico, another gift of U.S. drug and drone war.
Oh, you know what?
I can ask you one more thing about that.
Nobody cares if I screw up the outro.
Hey, so I read a thing where they quoted some congressman who apparently is interested in this.
And he says, I'm completely paraphrasing badly that up game is up for the American empire, Pax Americana is over because of drones, because of swarming drones that essentially make the entire American military obsolete in anybody else's country, wherever, you know, our fighter jets and whatever it is, we got to land them somewhere.
And then so that's it.
Your your ships at sea are obsolete.
Your planes in the sky are obsolete.
And your infantry divisions are obsolete because of swarming drones.
And if it didn't this year, it's in 2023, they'll be in the hands of not just the Mexican drug lords, but any violent group on the planet wants to use them and certainly national governments who want to keep the U.S. out and that it completely changes the balance of everything.
So what do you think about that?
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the emergence of small drones that can operate in swarms will greatly complicate things for the U.S. military.
It already has.
And that's likely to get worse.
I don't know if that means the end of the U.S. empire.
That seems a premature conclusion as far as I'm concerned, but it's certainly going to complicate matters.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and you know what?
I was paraphrasing, but I'm pretty sure that was what he was saying, like this means an entire rethink of our global posture.
We just got to give it all up, like something along those lines.
And you know what?
I should have written down that congressman's name.
Sounds important now that I think about it.
I have to look that up again.
But anyway, thank you, Ted.
Appreciate it so much.
Yeah, no problem.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, you guys.
Ted Carpenter.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com.
Anti-war dot com.
Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
