Why the Arizona Law is Needed

Ralph Peters on how the rule of law is collapsing in northern Mexico and how that is spreading to our border states:

South of the border, down Mexico way, a new and savage revolution rages just beyond our inspection lanes. After less than five years of fighting, estimates of the dead have reached 22,000.

The rate of killing accelerates each month. And Washington covers its eyes like a kid at a scary movie. Well, the Mexican narco-insurgency, in which well-armed guerrilla forces confront the authority and presence of the state, is our No. 1 security challenge.

The chaos in northern Mexico has far deeper implications for our country than Islamist terror or even an Iranian nuclear capability (as grim as those threats are).

The rule of law has collapsed from Tijuana on the Pacific's edge to Matamoros and the Gulf of Mexico. Major cities are now "ungoverned spaces," as our diplomats refer tidily to distant trouble spots.

More people now die violently on our southern border than in Somalia, Yemen or even Afghanistan. But Washington doesn't know what to do about Mexico. So Washington does nothing much.

Our ruling class simply doesn't feel the pain. So the DC elite demonizes Arizona's desperate effort to shove the narco-revolution's disorder back across the border. Murdered ranchers, overwhelmed emergency rooms and soaring crime rates in our border states mean less to the White House than a terrorist detainee's claims of abuse. Our governing elite pretends that illegal immigration, torrential crime where illegals cluster, overcrowded prisons, Mexico's narco-insurgency, legal cross-border commerce and the drug trade are separate issues, to be addressed discreetly.

But these issues are all interwoven with the Mexican government's existential crisis. Drug wealth fuels criminal empires. Those narco-empires are now so powerful that they've risen against the state. Human trafficking is a useful sideline for drug lords. And illegal immigration drives crime rates in bankruptcy-threatened US cities and states.

Cross-border trade's the next target. Narco-insurgents now feel sufficiently confident to attack Mexican army installations and US consulates. The maquiladoras, those thousands of assembly plants along the border, won't escape the mayhem. Given their enormous contribution to Mexico's fiscal stability and employment rates, those plants are obvious targets as the narco-challenge to the state intensifies.

Mexican journalists, too, have been killed by the hundreds. Their torture and execution doesn't generate much excitement north of the border, though. It's their bad luck to be butchered by Mexican narcos. Had they been killed accidentally by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, they'd be famous martyrs.

And Arizona's "discriminatory" new state law empowering police to pursue criminal aliens? Should Phoenix let the rule of law collapse because Washington prefers political correctness to public safety? In DC, it's about politics. In Arizona, it's about survival.

It bewilders me that my fellow citizens don't take the disintegration of government authority in northern Mexico seriously. As I've written repeatedly, no country is more important to us socially, economically and security-wise than Mexico. Afghanistan's fluff by comparison.