LOS TERRORISTAS?

House Speaker Dennis Hastert is foolish to evoke the U.S. war on
terror as a reason to become more directly embroiled in Colombia's
civil war. While Colombian rebels have engaged in kidnappings,
political assassinations and even some bombings, they have never
posed a direct threat to the United States. The Islamist terrorists
whom America is pursuing want to destroy this country and its
citizens, and Hastert's opportunistic machinations risk blurring the
uncomplicated focus of the citizenry.

Colombia has been a pool of quicksand waiting for a GI's boot since
the U.S. military directly involved itself in that country's drug war
two years ago. Now President Bush wants to shift U.S. resources from
drugs to rebels, which is the kind of Vietnam-style mission creep
that critics predicted when U.S. helicopters and soldiers first
headed south. Critics worried then, and must feel certain now, that
America is on a slippery slope that will lead to its soldiers
fighting and dying in the jungles of South America.

If this is the plan, Bush and Hastert owe Americans an honest
explanation of why Colombia matters. It's true that the country
boasts the oldest democracy in South America and is America's
10th-biggest supplier of oil. It is also a fact that Colombia's
proximity to the Panama Canal gives the entire Western world a stake
in the nation's stability. But are these reasons enough to involve
the United States? Bush and Hastert haven't said.

Crying "terrorism" is easier than making a rational case for joining
Colombia's 40-year-old civil war, but the transparent
disingenuousness of the strategy is bound to breed public cynicism in
the long run. That's something America can't afford with years of
unavoidable conflict on the horizon. Whatever the merits of helping
Colombia, it isn't worth eroding public support for a war that
America must win.