ANOTHER VIETNAM?

Proponents of a less-interventionist U.S. foreign policy were heartened by
the election last year of President Bush, who had promised to scale back
U.S. military commitments around the globe.

The announcement last week that a few hundred U.S. troops will soon be
transferred out of Bosnia appeared to be evidence that foreign policy is
indeed heading in a new direction. Unfortunately, that direction seems more
geographical than philosophical, since Bush will send an equal number of
U.S. troops south to Ecuador this year to provide indirect support for
Colombia's crackdown on drug producers.

Anyone familiar with the Monroe Doctrine will quickly point out that South
America has long represented a clearer U.S. interest than the Balkans, and
proponents of the U.S. war on drugs can argue persuasively that any effort
to eradicate cocaine and heroin is something that the United States should
support. But recent efforts to fight America's voracious appetite for drugs
at the South American source have been spectacularly expensive failures,
and there is no reason to expect this latest $1.3 billion foray to be any
more successful in breaching the drug pipeline.

U.S. officials don't like to talk about a more likely result of their
efforts. Marxist guerrillas are the current caretakers of the lucrative
cocaine and heroin crops, and the threat that America will be dragged into
Colombia's 40-year-old civil war grows with the transfer of each new U.S.
soldier to the region.

Opponents of U.S. military involvement in South America have drawn
parallels to Vietnam, where a few hundred American "observers" became
participants in a civil war that ultimately killed more than 58,000 GIs.

Proponents of "Plan Colombia" flatly reject the possibility that Americans
are wading into another such quagmire, but at the same time they argue that
there is a vital U.S. interest in stemming the growing power of leftist
rebels in our hemisphere -- and getting the job done, they say, will
require the U.S. military.

If defeating Colombia's Marxist rebels is truly worth the risk of U.S.
lives, Bush should say so. The president should make his case directly to
the U.S. public instead of continuing an incremental military buildup in
South America on the pretense of eradicating drugs.