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Comment by TooSmugToFail | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like something that aims to to unlock the ability to use the military to go after the cartels on Mexican territory.

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Yes, I would expect kinetic action (missiles and SOF) before very long. I also anticipate he'll continue to engage in political provocations of Canada in hopes of engineering some kind of diplomatic incident.

That seems less likely than annexing small parcels of land, bit by bit. If there's some Canadian farmland with a meth lab on it, I could see the American coast guard seizing it for 'national security' It would put Canada in an uncomfortable position since Canada hasn't had to worry about defending its border in anyone's lifetime.

Are they gonna sail a cutter into Edmonton then?

It doesn't need to be Coast Guard, specifically, as long as it's a group people don't associate with war (eg: Forest Service, Law Enforcement, etc). A stand off between Canadian Mounties and American Park Rangers would result in fewer heart attacks than soldiers in army jeeps.

It's entertaining that you don't appear to think that any of this is insane.

It's all very stupid and dangerous.

The prospect of the USA invading Canada is so spectacularly insane that people wrongly assume it can't happen.

Are we going to invade China?

https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

More importantly, its a tool to paint the fact that fentanyl is imported from Mexico as an actual attack and use it as a pretext for another domestic invocation of the Alien Enemies Act targeting people in America for arbitrary action without due process, after the one using Tren de Agua as the pretext.

This, in turn, is a tool to try to advance Trump’s mass ethnic cleansing policy, without the case-by-case judicial oversight which it would otherwise be subject to.

Ding-ding. I think we have a winner. Venezuela was just a test. Seriously, a US president can order strikes abroad without a judge getting in the way. But for expelling people, then you need at least a pretense.

Hate to say it, but it's a clear TDS...

Do you think Mexican people enjoy living cartel life?

The Iraqi people living under Saddam weren't so happy either but did that justify invasion on the false premise of WMDs and the resulting hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? I'd be on board with your statement if another Republican hadn't already pulled the same dumb shit within my lifetime before..

What would have been a justifiable premise for invasion then?

Actual WMDs?

Life in Iraq before WMDs wasn't exactly paradise...

"wasn't exactly paradise" places the bar is so low it would justify invading Disneyland.

Iraq gave up its WMD research programs in 1991, so the "before time" is 1962: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...

"Doesn't have any WMDs" is also something I can say about Disneyland.

But Disney World did get permission to build their own nuclear reactor: https://www.ans.org/news/article-6500/disney-world-should-ha...

My understanding is that they would like it if US people stopped giving the cartels huge sums of money to feed their drug habits. I'm not sure they want US military incursions.

> Do you think Mexican people enjoy living cartel life?

Whether Mexican people enjoy living “cartel life” is completely irrelevant, one way or the other, to the trends in the linkage between Trump's foreign policy rhetoric and domestic actions that I am talking about.

Mexican, "snow Mexican" (as us Canadian's are occasionally referred too as...) - who knows at this point...

Any nation that has even a whiff of fentanyl possibly coming across the border.

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