ZARQAWI AND THE DRUG WAR

After several consecutive months of bad news for U.S. officials - the
Marine massacre at Haditha, the disclosure of secret CIA renditions
and torture camps in former Soviet-bloc countries, the weekly deaths
of American troops, and the daily kidnappings, beheadings, and
suicide bombs in Baghdad - U.S. officials and pro-occupation
supporters received a big morale booster with the killing of Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, or as Australian Prime Minister John Howard put it,
"a huge boost for anti-terrorist forces in Iraq."

But isn't this the same type of periodic morale booster that we've
seen in the war on drugs for the past 30 years? How many times have
we seen federal officials and the news networks over the years hyping
the arrest or killing of some big drug lord?

Do you recall the capture of Manuel Noriega, the leader of Panama?
U.S. officials, as well as the mainstream news media, were totally
hyped up during the military invasion of Panama to capture someone
accused of being one of the primary drug dealers in the world -
someone who, by the way, had been on the payroll of the CIA. The news
briefings and press coverage of the Panamanian invasion and capture
of Noriega came close to matching that of the Zarqawi killing. In
fact, amidst all the hoopla, one could have even been forgiven for
concluding that Noriega's capture finally meant that the decades-long
war on drugs would be finally over.

Alas, it was not to be. There were always more drug dealers and drug
lords to go after. There was also the perpetual need for
ever-increasing federal budgets to finance the continuation of the drug war.

Do you recall the famous Medellin Cartel, which operated out of
Colombia in the 1970s and 1980s, and its leaders Pablo Escobar and
Carlos Lehder? For years, the feds focused the public's attention on
them, much as they do now with particular terrorists, suggesting that
busting them would bring a "major blow" to the illegal drug trade.

Ultimately Escobar was killed, Lehder was incarcerated, and the
Medellin Cartel was destroyed. What happened? The feds simply moved
on to new drug-war targets on which they focused the public's
attention. Even today - after more than 30 years of drug warfare -
hardly a week goes by without some law-enforcement agency, either at
the national, state, or local level, striking a "major blow" in the
long-running drug war by making another big drug bust, an event that
is then inevitably hyped by the local or national news media.

No matter how many drug busts are made or drug lords arrested or
killed, the drug war continues onward with no sign of it ever ending.

The reason is simple: It is the federal government's drug war itself
that gives rise to the drug dealers and drug lords that it then gets
all hyped up about busting. Without the drug war, there would be no
drug lords to bust because they'd all be out of business, much as
booze lords went out of business with the end of Prohibition.

It's no different with the government's war on terrorism, where the
killing of one terrorist simply produces more terrorists, which means
that the war on terrorism, like the war on drugs, continues onward
with no sign of its ever ending.

The reason is simple: It is the federal government's own
interventionist foreign policy, including the death and destruction
that arise from such policies as sanctions, invasions, and
occupations, that give rise to the deep anger and hatred that then
produces the terrorist blowback.

By dismantling America's overseas military empire, and restoring the
noninterventionist foreign policy of a constitutional republic, the
threat of terrorism against the United States would disappear.

Thus, the American people have a choice to make, with respect not
only to the war on drugs but also to the war on terrorism. If they
choose to continue such wars, they simply need to recognize that the
result will be an endless supply of drug lords and terrorists and,
therefore, perpetual war. And as we continue to learn, there are
enormous financial costs that come with such wars, to say nothing of
ever-growing infringements on civil liberties.

If, on the other hand, Americans want to eliminate the supply of drug
lords and the supply of terrorists and restore a stable, prosperous,
and free society to our land, there is but one way to accomplish
that: by ending the war on drugs as well as the U.S. government's
interventionist foreign policy.