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Murderous lies
by John A. Jackson
"This is not Vietnam," President Clinton declared last month in Cartagena, Colombia.
Alarm bells should have rung in every U.S. city.
Not Vietnam, indeed.
Clinton was announcing a new $1.3 billion aid package for the embattled South American nation. Almost a billion dollars of that money would go straight to the Colombian military. They will use it to kill peasants, or to train themselves to kill peasants. Or U.S. soldiers will train them.
What our soldiers will not do is kill the peasants themselves. We have the President's word for that. What he said, exactly, is, "There won't be American involvement in a shooting war because(the Colombians)don't want it and we don't want it."
Nor is it just any kind of Colombian peasant that our money will kill. We have President Clinton's word for that, too.
Colombian soldiers already wage an incredibly complex network of conflicts against what are usually described as left-wing and right-wing revolutionaries. These wars, like a jagged scar, run through a century or more of Colombian history. They have a lot to do with power and practically nothing to do with ideology.
At this point, the rebels hold more than half the countryside, and the military appears too weak, too frightened or too corrupt to do much about it.
The United States, quite properly, prefers the Colombian government to what amounts to gangs of warlords and their mercenary followers. But fighting these insurgents is explicitly not what our new military aid is for.
This is not Vietnam, remember. Not El Salvador. Nor Nicaragua. Nor Somalia. Nor Haiti. Nor you-name-it.
What this is is the War on Drugs.
The insurgents of all kinds earn hundreds of million dollars a year from Colombia's infamous drug lords. These well-paid and well-armed rebels then discipline any peasants who might want to grow food instead of coca. The rebels also protect, process and transport the drug lords' deadly goods.
Presumably, President Clinton just promised us that when a Colombia soldier levels his brand-new U.S.-made rifle at a suspected insurgent, the soldier will shoot if the rebel works for the drug lords-and let the rebel shoot him if he's just an honest revolutionary. That's what Clinton says he wants.
What will really happen?
The usual, tragic things. Colombia has something under 40 million people. Two million of them have already become refugees, a million in the last year alone. Modern weaponry will kill tens of thousands more. Peasant villages can be found and bombed. They do not have anti-aircraft guns.
But Colombia is a huge country, 1,100 miles north to south and nearly 800 from east to west: mountains, jungles, endless swamps and plains, endless seacoasts on both oceans. The prospects of the military controlling it are zero. So the war will go on forever.
As long as it pays.
The $1.3 billion Clinton asked for is the first part of what Colombian President Andres Pastrana calls his $7.5 billion Plan Colombia.
Meanwhile, the drug lords are not hurting. They sell an estimated $50 billion a year worth of cocaine to United States customers. The Nixon-declared War on Drugs has lasted 30 years now. With inflation factored in, cocaine's street price has dropped every year.
There are no words to describe the criminal stupidity of our policy. But it is not Vietnam. We have Bill Clinton's promise for that. ER
John Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER