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Source: Official White House Photo

The Futility of Blowing Up Some Boats

Tough guys actions don’t solve massive problems.

Steven L. Taylor
6

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Source: Official White House Photo

The previous post caused me to go down a bit of a rabbit hole via the UNODC’s Global Report on Cocaine 2023. It is full of very informative charts, graphs, and maps. Let me just highlight two. The first shows the various general routes and methods used by cocaine smugglers. The second shows the locations of seizures.

It seems worth noting that despite the ever-increasing number of seizures, the overall amount of product making it to market remains more than able to meet demand.

At any rate, blowing up a few boats is not going to achieve much of anything in the grand scheme of things. This fact makes the situation all the worse, because, as I noted in the previous post, we are engaged in illegality, damaging our reputation, and asking US service members to engage in immoral acts so that Pete Hegseth can toss around words like “lethality” and “kinetic strikes” and feel like a tough guy on social media.

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6 responses to “The Futility of Blowing Up Some Boats”

  1. Tim D. Avatar
    Tim D.

    Hard not to conclude Trump is pro-cocaine. Not only will blowing up the boats have zero impact on the flow of drugs, pardoning JOH greatly undermines any cooperation with the relevant countries.

    5
  2. Jay L. Gischer Avatar
    Jay L. Gischer

    The point of this, from Hegseth’s mind, I think, is to be scary. If drug runners might get killed, then they won’t do it. That is the logic. So we are gonna kill drug runners as loudly and as publicly as possible. If it gets about that we don’t follow any “rules”, even better. We are dangerous!

    I don’t think that works, though. People do all kinds of scary things as long as there is good money involved. There is always that guy who thinks, “that won’t happen to me.”

    I mean, Russia is fielding an army of people who have been recruited via cash bonuses. What are one’s odds as a front-line cannon-fodder guy in the RA? But there are lots of them who take the money and figure that it won’t happen to them.

    5
  3. Kathy Avatar
    Kathy

    @Jay L. Gischer:

    It gets worse than that.

    Drug cartels sometimes employ a strategy called plata o plomo (silver or lead). Meaning you can get paid for doing what they ask, or they can kill you if you refuse (and maybe your family as well). After a few murders, other people are more amenable to get paid for dangerous work.

    And as noted in another thread, there are other routes and other shipping options. If this wasn’t so, interdiction efforts in the past would have ended the drug trade long ago.

    Want to end the drug trade forever, then end humanity. It’s the only way to make sure.

    4
  4. Ken_L Avatar
    Ken_L

    “I was told the names of the men on the boat, and they all appeared on a list of terrorists I’d been given.” That was literally the admiral’s excuse for murdering them, even though he knew their cargo was not going to the USA.

    Adolf Eichmann could not have said it better.

  5. Assad K Avatar
    Assad K

    @Ken_L:

    Hopefully that list was a little more reliable than the “No fly” list.

  6. Ken_L Avatar
    Ken_L

    @Assad K: How was he supposed to know there was more than one Santiago Hernández in Latin America?

    2

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