One of the bloodiest conflicts in the world today is going on in our own backyard — Mexico.

If you turn on CNN, Fox News or MSNBC on any given day of the week, all you’ll see is the escalating situation in the Middle East.

Violence for violence’s sake is becoming the norm.

Nearly 50,000 people have been killed since the start of the War on Drugs in 2007, according to CNN.

The only time you’ll see this on the news is when they capture the leader of a large cartel. These cartel jefes smile in every mugshot. It’s a smile that says, “You can’t touch me.”

They’re right, we can’t touch them. Even if we put those leaders in jail — like with any criminal organization — there will be a struggle for power between potential replacements.

Cut off the head, two take its place.

By conducting the war on drugs in the same fashion as we would conduct a traditional war, we are losing.

This is not a traditional war. This is business.

The people who are getting killed are Mexican civilians, not cartel gangsters like we’d like to believe.

The cartels will not stop so long as there is a demand for their product and money to be made. The solution is not as simple as “legalize everything,” although that strategy would show progress.

These crime syndicates trade in anything black market, that is, anything that is not legal to sell. Vis-a-vis marijuana, cocaine, guns and girls.

Where is this demand coming from? The United States.

We don’t buy brick weed, blow was so 80’s and all of our guns are certified American, we say. But that is a lie.

We are fueling the conflict in Mexico and building literal walls to ignore it.

There is no simple solution to this problem. Legalization would be a start, but instead we institute programs like Fast and Furious, a failed firearm trafficking plan that the federal government fumbled.

“Fast and Furious was an operation so cloak-and-dagger Mexican authorities weren’t even notified that thousands of semi-automatic firearms were being sold to people in Arizona thought to have links to Mexican drug cartels,” according to Forbes.

Essentially, we sold lots of guns to known cartel members we planned on tracking — and then lost them.

“According to ATF whistleblowers, in 2009 the U.S. government began instructing gun storeowners to break the law by selling firearms to suspected criminals,” according to Forbes.

Palm to face, shaking my head.

Because the idea of legalizing drugs in the United States is so abhorrent to many among us, we decide to just give guns to them instead.

Let me reiterate — should we tax, regulate and control marijuana and treat drug addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal offense, or should we give the cartels more guns and let them fight it out?

Again, palm to face, shaking my head.

The economy of Latin America is entirely dependent on the economy of the United States, both in legal and illegal commodities.

The U.S. dollar is just as much Mexico’s currency as is the peso. The same goes for other Latin American nations.

The exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Panamanian balboa is always even, one for one.

Ecuador’s official currency is the U.S. dollar.

We have a greater responsibility to protect the immediate interests of our next-door neighbors and ourselves rather than load up the cargo jets and invade yet another Middle Eastern nation.

Iraq one, Iraq two, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran — are we picking names out of a hat now?

The war on drugs and cartel presence in the United States and Mexico are an infinitely greater threat to national security and the American way of life than jihadists in Yemen or nuclear physicists in Iran. Is it that difficult to comprehend?

Palm to face, shaking my head.