HOW MEXICO'S WAR ON CARTELS IS LIKE THE WAR IN IRAQ

Barack Obama may not have realized it while in Iraq, but the trip was
an apt preview for his Mexico visit last week, where he once again
confronted the consequences of a war of choice rushed into by an
unprepared president.

Having been sworn into office in December 2006, under the lingering
clouds of an uncomfortably close election that July - an electoral
triumph the left considered tainted - Mexico's Felipe Calderon boldly
legitimized his government, and changed the subject, by declaring war
on the nation's formidable drug cartels and mobilizing the army
against them. It was a smart, though short-sighted, political move
that turned out to be a national security blunder his administration
has been trying to recover from ever since.

The parallels to the Iraq war are striking. For starters, the
rationale behind Calderon's decision to take on the cartels shifts
constantly - as did the Bush administration's reasoning for taking on
Saddam Hussein - depending on the narrative being spun at any given
moment and the speed with which past justifications started to ring hollow.

First, the cancer of the drug trade was eating away at the civic
fabric of Mexico's democracy and its institutions. Then it became a
matter of saving our children, because Mexico's consumption rates
were rising (a claim the government has yet to back up with
persuasive evidence). While in London for the G-20 summit, Calderon
gave the impression that his decision to unleash the military on the
cartels was made necessary by the United States lifting the 1994-2004
ban on assault rifle sales.

The drug cartels are a vicious enemy of Mexican democracy and
security; I don't mean to sound cavalier about that or to suggest
that Calderon should have neglected the problem. But organized crime
is a long-festering problem, not (to go back to the Iraq analogy) an
imminent "ticking bomb" threat to the Mexican state that requires
all-out war. By pretending that it was, Calderon violated the
so-called Powell Doctrine, whereby a nation commits forces only when
it can count on overwhelming superiority, an exit strategy, a
definition of victory, and the full and lasting support of the
people. Calderon never had the first three and may be losing the fourth.

Obama is now faced with an escalating conflict along his southern
border, one on which his Mexican partner has staked all his
credibility. And it is quickly becoming a test of the U.S.
president's firmness as well.

Calderon got both governments into this predicament, and so Obama now
needs to be part of the solution. Indeed, the two governments must
close the embarrassing gap between the alarmist rhetoric deployed to
describe the war on the cartels and the meager resources deployed to fight it.

For all his bravado, Calderon is also falling short in ways that
would seem to belie the supposed gravity of the situation. Yes, it
may be audacious to send thousands of troops to police the streets of
Ciudad Juarez, but Calderon appears quite hesitant to overcome
Mexico's traditional (and perfectly legitimate) sensitivities about
sovereignty. This is not Colombia, where the only limits on U.S.
military advisers were dictated in Washington.

Calderon needs to be direct and specific about what he needs, rather
than encouraging the Mexican government to continue its vague
complaints about the shared responsibility that emerges from a
problem fueled by U.S. guns, money and demand for drugs. And Mexico
must finally create the national police force that three successive
administrations have promised in vain to build - and not just by
putting army troops in new uniforms.

At the moment, to use one of Calderon's recurring medical analogies,
the malady (cancer) is being treated by the policy equivalent of a
couple of aspirin. So something - either the diagnosis or the
treatment - has to change. Or, to put it in the diplomatic language I
picked up as foreign minister under Calderon's predecessor: It's time
for both governments to put up or shut up.