re: #199 jwb7605

The fucking government is relying on Fox News? Am I misreading that?

If not, PATHETIC.

The E-5 is a civvie, now, like me. The difference is, he has the background to “read between the lines”. The original reports (some quoted here on LGF) that Mexico was in dire straits were inaccurate reports of the original “wargame” scenario being taken as the real deal. (We all know about those- wargame scenarios can get very surreal, as almost any even remotely possible situation has been gamed out at the Pentagon over the years. Think Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor- a confrontation with Japan, unlikely as it sounds, was “gamed” in the Clinton years.) When he told me that the scenario was no longer “just” a “what if?”, my “uh-oh” circuit went on.

If the news from south of the Rio Grande continues in the vein I’ve seen in the WaPo and elsewhere recently, it’ll probably kick in my “oh s#!t” circuit. Trouble along that border we don’t need any time, but especially not now.

BTW, the E-5 predicts that if Mexico does go into “drug war” mode, the result will probably look a lot like Lebanon in the Eighties. With a side order of Somalia in the Nineties. The difference being that unlike places where there are ethnic or religious rivalries, the main driving force will be money and the desire to control the traffic that generates same (drugs). That’s a recipe not so much for civil war as “me and my buddies are gonna whack you and your buddies for trying to muscle in on our action, or because we’re muscling in on yours.”

Think Chicago (Capone and Moran) or New York (the Five Families) in the Roaring Twenties, just on a much bigger scale.

/Keep your fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t happen.

cheers

eon