We will hear more soon about Mexico drug war

The worsening drug war on the U.S.-Mexican border earned only a brief mention in President Barack Obama's press conference Tuesday evening, but we will be hearing more about it.

As the president noted, the Mexican government has dispatched its military to take over from police deeply corrupted by the drug cartels' payoffs and bribery, and the Obama administration has newly assigned hundreds more agents to the border and is sending additional technology.

In both countries, those are only stop-gaps. The drug trade is so extensive and profitable that it is unlikely to yield to even the sternest and most technically sophisticated of the usual deterrents. The rival cartels' own shoot-outs are piling up bodies without discouraging the trafficking. In effect, even summary execution hasn't slowed recruiting.

An analysis for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns that, unchecked, the drug war could metastasize into a political insurrection whose complications for this country could be grievous.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is confronting the challenge boldly and the problem is mainly Mexico's to handle, but the violence is spilling into the American Southwest, drugs from Mexico are spreading east and north and the trade is provoking more illegal immigration and is hampering legitimate trade.

Mexico's efforts and our own interests deserve more from the United States than the temporary surge Obama has ordered. We need to rethink fundamental policies. Obama hinted as much himself Tuesday when he said, "We need to do more to make sure that illegal guns and cash aren't flowing back to the cartels."

Perversely, our own loosey-goosey gun trade is largely arming the cartels. President Bush gave cartel violence a boost when he reneged on a pledge not to let the ban on military-style assault weapons lapse. The huge loophole that forgoes background checks for gun-show sales allows straw buyers to load up stateside and clean up Mexico-side.

The bloody result is just one more of the prices we pay to appease our domestic gun lobbies and their political intimidation.

And it is our huge market that enriches the drug gangs. Generations of a sometimes waxing, sometimes waning but never ending "war" on drugs manifestly failed decades ago. Rather than daring to look for a better strategy we keep grinding away at the "war" futilely with nothing much to show for it but a booming prison industry.