Iraq Emerges as a Major Drug Trafficking Zone

Part of a pattern?

As mentioned in an AP story last week, Iraq has emerged as a major middle-eastern drug trafficking zone. According to the International Narcotics Control Board based in Vienna, the Bush administration's emphasis on terrorism necessarily takes away from its focus on drugs.

But there is also a suspicious pattern of drugs, politics and economics that seem to follow the US around. For instance, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, opium poppy cultivation was outlawed and production fell from 4,042 tons per year to a little over 80 tons per year. Within a year of the October, 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, opium poppy production had grown to 3,400 tons per year. By 2004, it had reached 4,200 tons. One hundred fifty tons more than before the Taliban took power and neaqrly eradicated opium poppy production.

Then there's Colombia. Despite a twenty year, US funded "war on drugs," Colombia (one of the few remaining US allies in Latin America) remains one of the biggest producers of cocaine and traffickers of heroin in the world. Some think the drug war is a facade, a reason to aid the right-wing Colombian government in its on-going guerilla war against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a communist group who have been blamed for the drug trafficking), because "the notion of a war against drug production is eminently more marketable to U.S. politicians and voters than a post-Cold War crusade against South American Communist guerrillas."

Look at Nicaragua in the 1980s. A CIA inspector general's report, released in January, 1998, confirmed that unnamed CIA authorities had effectively blocked federal investigations of Contra drug trafficking. It also gave evidence of the complicity of William Casey and the Reagan administration by frustrating independent investigations for political reasons (this was also the era of the Iran/Contra "arms for hostages" scandal). The US under Reagan was willing to do just about everything--including tacitly allowing international drug-trafficking and giving support to terrorist insurgencies--to fight communism.

And now Iraq. Anyone here see a pattern? I'd love to read your comments on this, pro or con.