SOMETIMES, IN A RELATIONSHIP, all your partner really wants is for you to validate his or her feelings and admit you’re part of the problem.

I’m guessing that’s why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who understands a thing or two about contentious close relationships, finally acknowledged this week that America’s “insatiable” appetite for drugs doesn’t help our neighbors to the south one bit.

The Mexican government is pulling out all the stops to do battle with a better armed and better organized group of drug cartels, and thousands are dying in the process. But who is paying the enemy? Let’s recreate the money trail.

Say a cocaine user in Tulsa, Oklahoma gives a dollar to his dealer. That dealer, in turn, ends up giving it to his wholesaler, who quite possibly works for a Mexican cartel. That dollar will likely end up either pimping out some kingpin’s car, corrupting a politician or police officer, or buying a scary-looking gun that is then smuggled back from the U.S.

Great. We get it.

This is where the story stops conforming with the popular leftist narrative that holds the U.S. responsible for everything that ever went wrong in Latin America. Yes, we are part of the problem, and should be part of solving it. But Clinton’s mea cupla (which will, presumably, will be followed by similar statements Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and President Obama, who are both due to visit Mexico in the coming weeks) is probably useful only to the extent that it helps Mexico get over the idea that we’re the whole problem. 

What are we supposed to do, goes the typical Mexican refrain, when this river of money and guns is flowing into our country from the U.S.? While living in Michoacan, I heard it from friends. It comes out of President Calderon’s mouth frequently. A Mexican friend of mine posted it as a comment a few blog posts ago.

Sure, it’s easier to focus on other people’s problems, which is why the U.S. didn’t bother to acknowledge the elephant in our room until this week. But blaming Mexico’s narco trafficking problem on American drug users is a bit like blaming the global recession on Americans who wanted mortgages. Sure, there’s some technical truth in it, but actually turning that part around is next-to-impossible and completely ignores the structural issues that allowed the problem to fester out of control in the first place.

For decades, a succession of Mexican governments either left the cartels alone or actually supervised the trafficking. Over the years, the gangs consolidated their power, started fighting with each other, and even diversified their portfolios to include kidnapping for ransom, extortion, and drugs for domestic - not just gringo - consumption.

So what happens when you let a bunch of thugs armed to the teeth run around a country unsupervised? You get a situation where, these days, normal citizens are scared to report drug violence to police. Why bother, really, since the police have probably already signed off on it. No use complaining to the mayor either, given that if he’s still alive, he’s probably on the take too. Journalists who report in too much detail on this disgusting situation have found severed heads delivered to their offices or worse, been killed.

This makes Mexico a less safe place, but it also delivers a gut punch to the economy. Try running a business in the middle of a corrupt legal system, where all your R & D and job creation money goes to an extortion racket.

So what if all American drug users quit tomorrow? Would Mexico be rid of this cancer? Hardly. Would gangsters be able to find a new source of guns if we managed to clamp down on sales? Yes.

And what, really, is the likelihood of reducing demand for drugs in the U.S.? Maybe if we devoted all of our national energy to the problem we could produce a drop of 20 percent in the next ten years. That would be revolutionary, but it wouldn’t really help Mexico that much. 

American money is an enemy in this conflict, but Mexican political corruption is a bigger (and more vulnerable) one. Mexicans, who are generally less apt to organize themselves for political change than we are, need to get over that and take their country back as soon as possible. (Including adding some teeth to their pro forma border checkpoints.) We should help however we can, but there’s only so much we can do.

It’s so easy to see bodies piled up and then to blame drug money from the U.S. But Mexico is not alone in receiving this dubious bounty. Canada, too, gets billions from the pockets of Yankee users, in exchange for what I’m told is some top shelf marijuana. Yet the chief of police in Winnipeg did not recently resign because a local cartel threatened to kill one of his officers every other day if he didn’t (see Juarez). They haven’t discovered any drug tunnels between Vancouver and Blaine, Wash. recently (Tijuana). And Miss Manitoba was not arrested last year in a car full of drug smugglers (Sinaloa).

I have several Canadian friends, and none of them report personal experiences with kidnapping and murder. The same cannot be said for my Mexican friends.

So here’s hoping the validation coming out of the Obama administration will lead to progress. By taking some responsibility, the U.S. might just inspire its neighbors to follow suit.