Friedman Loses Me

Tom Friedman, praising the inclusion of heavyweights working on regional problems in the State Department, seems to wonder if Mexico couldn't use a little more attention, or maybe even a George Mitchell of its own operating at Foggy Bottom:

Did anyone notice that the State Department issued a travel advisory for Mexico last week, warning that “Recent Mexican Army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat ... Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico ... During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped.” That is Mexico, not Pakistan!

[Break]

No, Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have too many super sub-secretaries. The truth is, she may not have enough.

First of all, is he somehow oblivious to all the mainstream press Mexico has received lately? "Did anyone notice" that Mexico has experienced an uptick in drug violence? No, no one at all, with the exception of Barry McCaffrey, Marty Peretz, Michael Hayden, Jorge Castañeda, Newt Gingrich, Reihan Salam, Christian Brose, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, the LA Times, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and virtually every other media outlet in the nation blessed with a circulation of more than one. 

Second, Mexico seems like a horrible candidate for a superstar diplomat bent on solving the nation's problems. Indeed, the spate of attention on Mexico in the past several months has done absolutely nothing to alleviate the problem. The only plate-shifting actions the US could take to help Mexico would be legalizing drugs, drastically reducing demand for drugs, or crippling gun sales in the southwest. Aside from being very unlikely, none of those would benefit from an assistant secretary of state for Mexico's drug wars. The policies we would be more likely to consider --i.e., a revamped Mérida Initiative that focused more on training Mexican law enforcement and less on hardware-- can only help around the margins, if they can even do that. We could revive Dean Acheson and Thomas Jefferson and set them to work on the Mexico, and it wouldn't make much of a difference. Drug violence in Mexico is a Mexican problem, and it requires a Mexican solution.

Lastly, Friedman's prose can be mind-numbingly hokey, don't you think?

So George Mitchell is, in effect, “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Nurturing a Coherent Palestinian Authority and a Coherent Israeli Negotiating Position So That the Two Might One Day Be Able to Strike a Deal Again.” Richard Holbrooke is “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Bringing Coherence to the Afghan and Pakistan Governments So That They Can One Day Be Internally Stable and United Against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.” And Dennis Ross is “Super Sub-Secretary of State for Amassing Global Leverage on the Incomprehensibly Byzantine Iranian Government So That It Will Terminate Its Nuclear Weapons Program.”