QUIETLY GOING TO WAR

Is anybody else noticing, but here in an election year - buried among
the lesser news of larger publications - the careful reader can find a
worrisome development: the United States is going to war in Columbia.

Of course, it's not being sold that way. The Clinton Administration
would have us believe this is yet another skirmish in the War on
Drugs. "Columbia is a drug disaster," proclaims General Barry
McCaffrey, the US drug tzar, as Congress debates whether to supply the
Columbian military with an amazing array of weaponry.

The list, as reported by the Associated Press on Feb. 19, includes: an
airbase, 30 Black Hawk helicopters, 33 Huey helicopters, an RG-8A
reconnaissance plane, radar enhancements, and modern night-vision gear.

What the US is really preparing to go to war against is a guerrilla
group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), which
controls much of rural Columbia. By protecting and taxing drug
traffickers, "it earns perhaps $500 million a year," estimates The
Economist. "This income has helped the FARC to grow. It now has 17,000
men under arms, giving it a military power which far outweighs its
political support."

To make sure that Columbian government doesn't fall to the FARC, the
US is proposing to ostensibly train three battalions of anti-drug
soldiers. What the Clinton Administration seems to fear is "that the
FARC's insurgency is now out of control and is a threat to other
countries in the region," The Economist explains.

"[But] the FARC is not the only violent group in Columbia to be
involved with the drug trade. General McCaffrey concedes that some
rightwing paramilitaries own and operated cocaine-processing
laboratories."

And those paramilitary groups, as The New York Times reported Feb. 24,
work closely with the Columbian military despite being "involved in
killing civilians."

So if the issue is cocaine trafficking, let alone social justice, the
US should have no more interest in one side winning than the other.

But the Clinton Administration is trying to sell this war as our
military training three anti-drug battalions of their military so they
can stop the flow of cocaine into our country.

It's an old story. Since the Nixon Administration, we Americans have
been deluged with political grandstanding about The War on Drugs, but
the so-called war hasn't eliminated cocaine anymore than Prohibition
eliminated booze.

"The reason is elementary," sniffs The Economist. "Demand calls forth
supply. Prohibition and repression merely increase the price; and,
where cocaine is concerned, they have failed to increase it enough to
have any significant effect in reducing cocaine."

Instead, what the US has done has been to badger Andean countries such
as Bolivia and Peru to reduce their cocaine production. To the extent
this has been successful, it merely increased the amount of cocaine
production in countries such as Columbia and Mexico. In fact, Columbia
and Mexico turned out to be even better producers than Bolivia and
Peru because they are closure to the US market.

Worse yet, haunting echoes from the Cold War are beginning to resonate
around US embassies in Latin America; once again, there seems to be no
dictator so authoritarian that we won't back him if he will only join
us in our holy war. In Peru, as The Economist notes, President Alberto
"Fujimori's cooperation over drugs makes the Americans reluctant to
criticize his autocratic rule."

But ultimately, the shah is always overthrown and we are inevitably
blamed by a nation of angry Persians for having propped up the tyrant.

With national elections coming up, this is the one time West Marin
residents should be demanding answers from their members of Congress,
such as Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey. Can
they keep this distracted nation from marching off into the night?

I, for one, am tired of political grandstanding about drugs. What
should be done about serious drugs such as cocaine? I've heard police
chiefs say we ought to legalize them. Do our politicians have a better
idea?

Prohibition is over, and we still have alcoholics, but Al Capone is no
longer shooting up Chicago. If we legalized virtually all drugs,
probably some people would become addicts. But I'm willing to bet that
the number of driveby shootings would plummet.