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It’s often hard to keep our Mexican atrocities straight, but would you happen to remember the 43 Mexican students in Iguala who disappeared off a bus in September 2014? At the time, there were claims that local police had abducted and killed them at the behest of a drug cartel — hard as it might be to believe that drug lords could be so callous. But there were no arrests, and the remains of only two students were ever found.

Last weekend, The New York Times reported that they were, in fact, killed on the orders of a drug cartel — working hand in hand with what Mexico insists on calling the “military” and “police.” The cartel believed the hapless students were a rival drug cartel and demanded their liquidation.

Mexican police: Sure! Can I have 50 bucks?

As we also know, Mexico’s drug cartels have killed more Americans than have died in all foreign wars combined. They’ve killed more Americans than every terrorist group in history. Year after year, they kill more Americans than died in the entire course of the Vietnam War.

And now it’s beyond dispute that vast swaths of the Mexican government are helping. What’s the name for that again? Oh yeah! State-sponsored terrorism.

Of course, the U.S. government has known this for some time, at least since the students’ abduction back in 2014. As the students were being dismembered, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration happened to be surveilling a drug trafficking ring in suburban Chicago (thanks for “anchor babies,” Justice Brennan!). The DEA intercepted more than 20,000 text messages between the cartel and “(j)ust about every arm of government” in that part of Mexico, as the Times put it.

So why is Gov. Ron DeSantis the first presidential candidate to say the obvious: that he will designate the cartels transnational criminal organizations and threaten to deploy the military “across the border to secure our territory from Mexican cartel activities”?

How could three successive presidents — Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden — not have done that already? They know that millions of Americans are being turned into corpses or zombies by the drugs brought in by the cartels, and that far from fighting them, large swaths of the Mexican government are collaborators.

Why no retaliation? Why aren’t we throwing out Mexican drug traffickers (i.e., anchor babies and “asylum seekers”)? Why don’t we have the Great Wall of China on our border? Exactly how much do our elected representatives hate us?

Over the past half-century, presidents have promiscuously flung U.S. military power around the globe — Kosovo, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan (for more than 20 years!). But they will not lift a finger against the state-sponsored terrorist organization right across our border, which kills 100,000 Americans every year. That’s like two 9/11 attacks every month.

Our foreign policy mandarins assure us that our very freedoms depend on our military butting into conflicts around the globe, and then staying for decades.

In 1999, the U.S. military (under the NATO flag) bombed the Balkans to remove Slobodan Milosevic, who posed absolutely no threat to us.

In 2001, we bombed Afghanistan for hosting Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attack. Afghanistan had one flush toilet before the bombing started, and none three weeks later. Mission Accomplished.

But for some reason, Obama kept sending more troops, and Trump dared not cross the generals who told him we had to keep pouring money into Afghanistan. (Promises Made. Promises Kept!)

In 2011, again under the NATO flag, the Obama administration (Hillary) overthrew Moammar Gadhafi — leading directly to the “migrant” crisis now turning Western Europe into Somalia. This not only served no American interest, but decimated our European allies.

From 2014 to 2018, the American military destroyed ISIS, a terrorist organization that was a big problem for Iraq and Syria, but not for any American — unless they happened to be at an airport in Brussels or a concert in Paris. Thanks, Angela Merkel, for the tremendous idea to bring Middle Eastern terrorists to Europe with Hillary’s complicity (see above).

In 2018, Trump bombed Syria in retaliation for Bashar Assad’s attack on rebels that left 49 Syrians dead. We may be more valuable to God than a flock of sparrows — but apparently 49 dead Syrians are worth more to our government than a million dead Americans.

And in the past 18 months, we’ve doled out more than $75 billion to Ukraine to fight Vladimir Putin. Please explain how Putin is a greater threat to any American than the wasting away and miserable deaths of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, to say nothing of the gobs of taxpayer money lavished on pointless social services to “rehabilitate” the unrehabilitatable. (Plus the multiple millions lost to pure corruption.)

Our “foreign policy community” will pay any price, bear any burden, to make some random part of the world safer — as long as it’s not America.

Here’s how things would have gone if the warmongers, er, “foreign policy community,” had been advising Winston Churchill in the run-up to World War II:

1925 CHURCHILL: Have any of you read “Mein Kampf”? Apparently, Mr. Hitler lays out a plan for German conquest of all of central Europe.

Sir, we’re not wasting our time on that nonsense. Please focus: The important thing is that Chile just elected a liberal democrat, Emiliano Figueroa, who faces major opposition from the far-left labor party. They hate us for our freedoms! Britain’s No. 1 foreign policy goal is to back Figueroa.

1928 CHURCHILL: Is anybody paying attention to this Hitler chap in Germany? He’s barking mad, and he’s a lot closer to England than any Chilean leftists.

What? Are you a blood and soil type? We’ve pulled out of Chile, anyway. It’s now ruled by a dictator.

1933 CHURCHILL: I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but “Mein Kampf” just became a bestseller in Germany.

We’ll get to it later. Right now, the media are clamoring for more information about the recent Madagascar famine. It was horrible! Cattle wiped out, little children starving to death. Hey, could somebody get a picture of the starving kids to Ivanka?

1938 CHURCHILL: You want me to give half of Czechoslovakia to Hitler???

It’s only the Sudentenland, sir. [Rolling eyes] What do you want — a wall?

Far more important to saving democracy is our ability to successfully end a territorial dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay. If we don’t pour billions into negotiating a treaty to end the Chaco War, China will see how weak we are and invade Taiwan.

It would be great if our military would concentrate on defending America. Can’t the military industrial complex make its money in Mexico?