U.S.'S DOPEY POLICY

During the 1980s,in the thick of the Cold War, many U.S. political debates
centered around Central and South American backwaters as the Reagan
administration battled congressional Democrats over funding anti-communist
rebels and supporting anti-communist governments.

Because of the bitterness of the past debate, many observers find it odd
that there hasn't even been much debate, let alone bitter hostility, over
the Clinton administration's similar efforts to support the Colombian
government as it fights left-wing guerillas.

Although today's U.S. support is given in the name of the Drug War rather
than the Cold War, many of the dynamics are strikingly similar to earlier
days. Leftists are taking hostages, running drugs, kidnapping and engaging
in altogether brutal tactics. And, also like the old days, the government is
accused of violating human rights and allowing right-wing paramilitaries to
carry on a dirty war against the insurgents.

"Yet there hasn't been a similar public outcry over Washington's deepening
involvement with another Latin American government facing a leftist threat,"
wrote Associated Press reporter Jared Kotler in a news story published in
the Register on Friday. He pointed out that Colombia "has become the largest
U.S. military-aid recipient outside the Middle East."

The reasons have much to do with the reduced tensions in the wake of the
Cold War. It's difficult for many activists, liberal or conservative, to get
too concerned about guerrilla struggles in far-off lands now that the wars
have far fewer geopolitical implications.

Still, the end of the Cold War shouldn't lull Americans to sleep as our
nation becomes more deeply enmeshed in Colombian hostilities.

As Ivan Eland, a foreign policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute in
Washington, told us, U.S. efforts in Colombia can lead us too deeply into
the conflict. "There's always a danger of it becoming another Vietnam."

The real problem, he said, isn't that America isn't doing enough to help the
Colombian government battle the leftists who also are peddling cocaine, but
that the United States enforces a prohibition on drugs within its borders
that inflates the price of narcotics and makes the drug trade so appealing
to the rebels.

In other words, ending the Drug War at home will go a long way toward ending
the Drug War in the jungles of Colombia.