Former Attorney General William Barr has had enough of how Mexico’s drug cartels are bringing devastation inside the United State. He is calling for U.S. military intervention to end the carnage.
Barr focused on recent legislation introduced in Congress that would give President Joe Biden the authority to use the U.S. military to wage war against the drug cartels. He said since the head of the snake was on the southern side of the border, that is where the fight needs to be.
The Wall Street Journal featured an editorial on Thursday noting that 100,000+ Americans die yearly from drug overdoses. That is more than the number of American soldiers killed during the bloodiest year of fighting for U.S. forces during World War II.
Barr also explained that simply looking at the number of Americans killed from drug overdoses does not reflect the full extent of the damage caused by the cartels.
“A 2017 analysis, accounting for the costs of healthcare, criminal justice, lost productivity and social and family services, estimated that the total cost of America’s drug epidemic was more than $1 trillion annually, or 5% of gross domestic product,” he wrote. “Given the explosion in illicit drug deaths since then, this estimate now seems conservative.”
Barr said that aggressive action against cartels is effective and worked in the early 1990s when the U.S. and Colombian governments joined forces to eradicate the two most powerful cartels in the world at that time, the Medellín and Cali cartels.
Barr said this is what it will take to defeat the Mexican cartels:
“First, a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before, including a significant U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence presence, as well as select military capabilities. Optimally, the Mexican government will support and participate in this effort, and it is likely to do so once they understand that the U.S. is committed to doing whatever is necessary to cripple the cartels, whether or not the Mexican government participates.
Second, the danger cartels pose to the U.S. requires that we confront them primarily as national security threats, not a law-enforcement matters. These narco-terrorist groups are more like ISIS than like the American mafia. Case-by-case prosecution of individuals can be a part of an overall effort, but the only way to defeat them is to use every tool at our disposal inside Mexico. Merely designating the cartels as terrorist groups will do nothing by itself. The real question is whether we are willing to go after them as we would a terrorist group.”
