Just in time for President Felipe Calderon’s visit to the White House, CBS News hears from Agent John Dodson that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms allowed Mexican drug cartels to take hundreds of weapons over the border into Mexico – and not let the Mexican government in on it. The lax policy continued even as the guns “began showing up at crime scenes in Mexico.”
Despite a “schism” – as one ATF supervisor called it – among agents over the matter, the Bureau still allowed the gunrunning (the start of which they had on tape in Phoenix). According to Dodson, ATF was hoping “to see where the guns ended up, build a big case and take down a cartel.” It will surprise no one, I’m sure, to discover that no such thing happened. The guns did help a cartel cut down ATF agent Brian Terry, though.
An earlier CBS News story has more details: the Phoneix gun stores who alerted ATF to the suspicious buys and were told not to do anything about them; ATF agents ordered not to intercept the shipments; and guns at the scene where Terry was killed traced back to the Phoenix sales that the gun shop owners allowed at the express wishes of the Bureau. All for “big case” that never materialized.
This is yet another example of a certain mentality that drives me nuts: legal ambition above all. The Clinton and Obama Administrations share the crazy belief that prevailing in court is more important than preventing carnage (based on the timeline presented by CBS, this nonsense was hatched in the fall of 2009).
The problem with this silliness is that we’re talking about events outside the United States, meaning geopolitics comes into play – and geopolitics trumps everything. How could ATF be even allowed to decide that a mythical legal case against a cartel was more important than the risk of a crime wave in a friendly neighbor?
This will have reverberations on several matters at once. Any talk about illegal aliens will be met with furious outrage in Mexico City about what we allowed into Mexico. Meanwhile, Calderon suddenly has a perfect excuse for his drug-war campaign going sideways: American guns. It puts him in the clear, gives his party a rare opportunity to play the anti-American card (usually a winning play for the opposition PRI, but much harder for Calderon’s National Action Party to pull off). It even opens the door to a PAN upset in next year’s presidential election (which would probably be better for Mexico as a whole, while making this post completely moot). It may also, in painful irony, give said PAN government some appreciation for better border security – but good luck getting them to admit that publicly after this.
Honestly, someone with an ounce of geopolitical sense would have shot this down (pun intended) before it started. That things went as far as they did tells me either no one in this Administration has any geopolitical sense, or the domestic side of the government has way too much leeway.
Filed under: International Politics
[...] Cross-posted to VV [...]
This is like the Obama administration approach to terrorism. They see terrorism as a civilian legal problem, not as a military problem.
With gun running, the Obama administration sees this as a civilian legal problem, not a foreign policy issue.