BroadSnark

Bolivian president Evo Morales says that exports to the U.S. have decreased 8% due to Bolivia’s decertification under The Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA).  However, Morales expects that agreements with Venezuela, along with demand from Arab countries, will make up for the loss.  (Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been strengthening his ties with Bolivia and Venezuela.)

Supposedly, the U.S. government frowns on the increasing influence of Chavez in Latin America.  Supposedly, the U.S. government is worried about Iranian power around the world.  Supposedly, the Obama administration is trying to turn over a new leaf with Latin America.  So why would the U.S. government do something that alienates Latin American countries and sends them into the warm embrace of the very people they are trying to isolate?

It’s inexplicable, at least to any rational person, but U.S. drug policy has never been rational.

The United States is the leading consumer of cocaine.  Rather than dealing with U.S. addiction and its related problems, our policy has been to go after the “source.”  Now it takes many ingredients to make cocaine – sulfuric acid, kerosene, lime, sodium carbonate – but we have focused on going after the coca leaf.

Going after coca leaves may seem to make some sense, as the coca leaf is where the alkaloids that make you high are found.  But coca is a bush grown by subsistence farmers, campesinos, who often have no other viable cash crop.  And the coca leaf is an integral part of Andean culture and has been since at least 1800 B.C.

Unfortunately for Andeans and their traditions, a German chemist named Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the alkaloids in coca leaves.  Andean coca growers were everyone’s best friend when coca was used in legal products like Coca Cola and cocaine laced wine.  But once a handful of U.S. drug warriors decided that cocaine had to be stopped, we expected Andean people to turn their backs on thousands of years of culture and to just give up an integral part of their economy.

As the drug war ratcheted up, Andean people in Bolivia and elsewhere suffered the consequences.  Bolivia was pressured to eradicate coca crops using herbicides and fungicides that damaged food crops, contaminated water sources, and made people sick.  Human rights abuses escalated as pressure was put on Bolivia to militarize their anti-drug efforts and to impose increasingly draconian penalties on people involved in the coca and cocaine trades.

In addition to interdiction and eradication, drug warriors from the U.S. promoted crop substitution programs.  Loans were provided to farmers to grow crops other than coca and special trade deals were arranged to help open up U.S. markets to legal Andean goods.  The ATPDEA was part of that effort.

All of our efforts to stop drugs at the “source” have been an abysmal failure.  Substitute crops were no replacement for coca bushes which need little care and bring in far more money.  The only things U.S. imposed drug policies were effective at was alienating Andean people.  Nobody knows that better than Evo Morales, former head of the Chapare coca growers union.

Morales has taken the position that Bolivia should say no to cocaine, but yes to coca.  His refusal to acquiesce to all U.S. demands when it comes to drug policy has contributed to a testy relationship with the U.S. and to Bolivia’s continued decertification.

Now the decertification doesn’t really matter much.  It effects only a small amount of trade.  And the U.S. officials know damned well that, even if Morales did everything they want, it wouldn’t do anything to resolve the drug problem in the United States.  So it makes absolutely no sense that we would take action to piss off Bolivians (and their allies) and drive a further wedge between the U.S. and other countries of the Americas.

But sense and drug policy don’t seem to go together in the United States.

The Heritage Foundation put out a morning bell yesterday.  The gist of the message is that Obama slighted Reagan by not showing up for the Berlin wall ceremonies and for not mentioning Reagan in his speech.  Reagan is, of course, the savior who freed the world from the communists.

My personal favorite bit is the quote from Nile Gardiner:

Barack Obama simply does not view the world as Reagan did, in terms of good versus evil, as a world divided between the forces of freedom on one side and totalitarianism on the other. For the Obama administration the advancement of human rights and individual liberty on the world stage is a distinctly low priority, as we have seen with its engagement strategy towards the likes of Iran, Burma, Sudan, Venezuela and Russia.

Oh the irony of inferring that Ronald Reagan was a great defender of human rights.  The Reagan administration supported the most oppressive Central American governments in El Salvador and Guatemala.  They illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money for brutal counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua.  They closed their eyes to the massive illegal drug operations of their Contra buddies while incarcerating obscene numbers of American citizens for using the drugs.  And they invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada in flagrant violation of international law.

But I’m not writing this to rag on Reagan.  Too easy.  I want to write about the first part of the quote, the part about Barack Obama not seeing the world in terms of good vs. evil.  I want to write about the damage done by people who insist on dividing the world up like that.

What happens when you try to divide the world into good and evil is that the “good” people can do no wrong and the “bad” people can do no right.  How convenient to be on the hero’s side and never have to face an ethical dilemma.  The hero is good, therefore everything they do is good.  If they lie, cheat, murder, or torture it doesn’t matter.  They are the good guy, so their actions must be good.

And that victim of the lying, cheating, murdering, and torturing?  Well they are the villain.  Everything they do is bad.  If the villain saves a baby from a burning building, that inconvenient information is left out of the narrative or explained away as part of a sinister plot.  And how easy it is to dehumanize the bad guy.  Their guilt is pre-determined.  When someone from a vilified group acts in the way we expect, it confirms all our suspicions.  How easy it is to just throw them away, even a child.

Life is not a cowboy film or a fairy tale.  And we can’t afford to listen to people who have the worldview of a toddler.  Time to grow up.

In 1989 the Berlin wall fell and the cold war officially ended.  While most of the world was thrilled, arms dealers were less than excited.  The end of the cold war arms race meant a serious decline in sales.  But what to do?

The arms dealers needn’t have worried.  The U.S. government always looks out for them.  As this Foreign Policy in Focus article sums up nicely, the U.S. government from, Nixon to Clinton to Bush, aggressively pushes for arms sales around the world.  Any cold war drop was quickly made up.

In yesterday’s post, I described the enormous arms sales by developed nations (especially the U.S.) to developing nations.  The obvious question is, why?  Why would a developing nation spend so much money on arms?  Why would the people in those nations allow it?

In fact, why would any people allow so much of their money to be taken in taxes and paid directly to defense contractors who make obscene amounts of money?

Fear.

Arms dealers need to keep us all in a constant state of, if not war, at least fear.  Both fear and war in the Middle East have been keeping arms dealers very busy.  Take another look at that Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2001-2008 (CATDN) report.

Top purchasers of U.S., Russian, French and British arms include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco – whose arms transfer agreements in 2008 were worth $9.7 billion, $8.7 billion, and $5.4 billion respectively.

Is it any surprise that the United States, France, and the UK would stand united in their tough talk toward Iran?  Each of them stands to gain by keeping that area of the world militarized.  Note the following quote from the CATDN report.

The principal catalyst for major new weapons procurements in the Near East region in the last decade was the Persian Gulf crisis of August 1990-February 1991. This crisis, culminating in a U.S.-led war to expel Iraq from Kuwait, created new demands by key purchasers such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for a variety of advanced weapons systems. Subsequently, concerns over the growing strategic threat from Iran has become the principal driver of GCC states’ arms purchases. Because GCC states do not share a land border with Iran, their weapons purchases have focused primarily on air, naval, and missile defense systems. Egypt and Israel, meanwhile, have continued their military modernization programs, increasing their arms purchases from the United States.

(Interesting how this is just one year after the Berlin wall fell, no?)

As Scott Ritter explains in this Guardian piece, Iran is not in violation of any laws related to nuclear facilities.  And Iran is not any closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.  Iran has not been the aggressor in the area.  “When is the last time that Iran has invaded any other country?” Glenn Greenwald asks in this must see appearance, “You would have to go back several centuries.”

Now some of you are going to want to talk about how crazy Iran’s leaders are, how they violate human rights, victimize homosexuals and oppress women.   But if we care so much about human rights violations, why are we selling weapons to the United Arab Emeriates, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco?

Iran is easy pickings.  While we are hiding under our beds, the arms dealers, military contractors, oil companies, and other industries that profit from our fear are contemplating how to spend their bonuses.