The Colombia 'Model' and the Shamelessness of Interventionists

Hawks are once again peddling the foreign policy equivalent of snake oil.

Justin Logan and Daniel Raisbeck dismantle the bizarre claim that the U.S. can copy its “success” in Colombia by further militarizing the drug war in Mexico:

That is why Crenshaw’s soliloquy on how Colombia should be a model for our policy in Mexico is so strange. The U.S. government failed to solve the cocaine problem, but Crenshaw now heralds the “Colombia model” as an unqualified success. The reason we went into Colombia in the first place, cocaine, just fell out of the story altogether. The “do something!” impulse in U.S. foreign policy is strong, but surely a proposed solution to a problem should be able to pass scrutiny better than this.

The model that hawks use to make the case for their crackpot notion of military intervention in Mexico instead shows why it can’t possibly succeed on the hawks’ own terms. It is even less likely to succeed in Mexico because the U.S. would not have the cooperation of the Mexican government to carry out the raids and attacks that the interventionists want. In fact, the blockades of Mexican ports that some candidates endorse would be acts of war against Mexico. The U.S. at least had a willing partner in the Colombian government, and even then it didn’t succeed in its counternarcotics mission. The sort of militarized crackdown that hawks wanted then and want again today cannot do what they claim. Hawks are once again peddling the foreign policy equivalent of snake oil, and they do this safe in the knowledge that there is no accountability for selling the public on useless, destructive policies.