While Democrats and Republicans debate the stimulus package, Americans risk getting blind-sided by a serious security threat. Over the last few months, strategic elites in the United States have finally developed an appropriate sense of urgency about what some are calling the slow-motion collapse of the Mexican state. For at least four decades, powerful cartels have been transporting drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. More recently, as American immigration enforcement efforts have stepped up, transporting people has become another lucrative source of revenue--indeed, some say the so-called coyotes are the real money-makers these days.

Whatever the contraband being smuggled, the Mexican government has generally looked the other way, mainly because the Mexican government has always been fairly weak. Local police forces, ill-equipped, ill-trained and severely underpaid, are easy targets for the cartels: A well-placed bribe makes all the difference. Efforts to create an effective national police force, one that really could take on the cartels, have proceeded at a maddeningly slow pace. And so large swathes of Mexican territory aren't really under the control of Mexico City at all--they are ruled by the cartels.

On taking office, President Felipe Calderón decided to change all that. He declared war on Mexico's cartels, and the cartels are fighting back. In the old days, rival cartels would fight each other over territory, and the Mexican government would occasionally crack down on a single cartel or extradite someone to the Americans to keep everyone happy. Now, however, the cartels have launched a kind of terror campaign against the Mexican state, one that has involved targeted killings of high officials.

It is hard not to sympathize with President Calderón. If several American states were under the grip of criminal gangs, it's hard to imagine the federal government looking the other way. At the same time, you have to wonder why Calderón chose to declare when he did. Rather than ramp up the ability of Mexico's military and police forces to fight the cartels before taking them on, Calderón seems to have bit off more than he can chew, to put it mildly. In Mexico, many believe that Calderón declared war in an effort to boost his popularity. Having barely won the presidency against a charismatic left-wing candidate who still commanded the support of millions of poor voters, Calderón had a lot to prove. Taking on the cartels seemed like an effective way of establishing his legitimacy. Even if you don't buy this cynical take, and I'm not sure I do, the fact remains that Calderón made a serious strategic miscalculation.

Of course, this doesn't mean that Mexico is going to turn into Iraq overnight. But it's worth thinking through the parallels. Late in 2005, John Robb, a former Air Force officer and technology analyst, wrote a brilliant essay in The New York Times on the Iraq War. At the time, there was a real sense that the country's chaotic conflict was spiraling out of control. Yet very few observers had a clear sense of how the insurgency worked. There was no Che Guevara, no political focal point that united the Baathist diehards and jihadists that were waging war on the nascent Iraqi state. The insurgency appeared to be an essentially criminal enterprise, with no discernible end. Yes, the different groups called for ousting the occupiers--but they also smuggled goods and kidnapped rivals and generally behaved like common thugs. In "The Open-Source Insurgency," Robb identified the deeper logic behind the fighting. The defining fact about the insurgency was that it was not a single, disciplined entity; rather, it was "a resilient network made up of small, autonomous groups." As a result, it was "virtually immune to attrition and decapitation," the usual means by which the United States military would defeat its enemies.

Thankfully, Robb was overly pessimistic about Iraq. As Robb suggested, the U.S. eventually pursued an open-source counter-insurgency, which proved even nimbler and more effective than the insurgency itself. But the Mexican narco-insurgency has advantages that the Sunni militias never did. For one thing, Mexico's cartels have far more money to fuel their battle against the Mexican state. Also, the insurgents in Iraq faced the most fearsome military machine in history, whereas the cartels are taking on a crippled country in the grip of a severe economic downturn.

Sadly enough, it looks as though the fighting in Mexico will get worse before it gets better. The only solution I can think of is for Mexico to accept U.S. assistance that would include a massive effort to train Mexican forces to crush the cartels. But that's a step that won't appeal to Mexican nationalists, or, for that matter, to Americans who are wary of walking into an expensive military quagmire.