To the point

When you’re writing for something called the  “TransBorder Project of the Center for International Policy” I suppose it’s natural to fall into bureaucratic prose (full of references to “DTOs” — “Drug Trafficking Organizations”, or what the real world calls narcos — and such).  But, Tom Barry at least has the patience to read through documents like the White House’s July release of  a ” Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime” — which, as Barry points out — is a “strategy without strategic planning”,  and seems to involve shoving old whines into new acronyms.  And justifying plain old violent reactionary measures as something new and bloodless sounding.

He concludes his (bureaucratese and all) worth-while review:

 The Obama administration is blessedly free of the alarmism and fear-mongering that led the country into the two major wars and military occupations during the Bush administration. However, the Obama White House’s newly expressed determination to combat the rise of transnational crime suffers from the same type of exaggerations, moral imperatives, factual deficits, and ahistorical threat assessments that fueled Bush’s misbegotten global war on terrorism.

Dressing up the drug war in the framework of transnational threats and international cooperation represents a failure of vision. The Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime is simply another bureaucratic shuffle and makes a mockery of the administration’s declared commitment to “shared responsibility” for the drug-related crime and violence roiling Mexico and Central America.