AMERICA'S OTHER PERPETUAL WAR: $40 BILLION A YEAR TO DENY DEFEAT

David Murray, a drug policy analyst for the Bush administration, was
asked recently about cocaine cultivation in Colombia, where the United
States has been fighting an expensive, low-grade war against coca
growers since 2000. "This is a trade whose days are numbered," Murray
told The New York Times. The phrase rang of Vice President Dick
Cheney's evaluation of the Iraqi civil war in May 2005: "I think
they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." Someone
should find out what these Bush types are, if you will, smoking.

Iraqis are now getting killed at a rate of 40,000 a year, more than
three times the average annual kill-rate of the Saddam years.

Even the most friendly kind of reporting coming out of Iraq -- the
military embedded kind designed to make reporters sound like Cheney
cracking softballs on "Larry King Live" -- can't mask the region's
approximation of a Sam Peckinpah movie (think "The Wild Bunch" in
fast-forward). Coverage of the war is declining as the certainty of
American defeat is increasing. At least the debate over the Iraq
catastrophe goes on. The same can't be said about that other futility
warped by official lies, public indifference and $40 billion a year in
wasted taxpayer dollars -- the war on drugs.

That one was lost soon after Richard Nixon declared it almost 40 years
ago. But it's been every president's and governor's pet boondoggle
since.

It doesn't matter how useless it's been -- how many lives have been
ruined by its lock-up first, treat-rarely approach; how many people
have been killed, through turf and gang wars, by its criminalization
of a vice less harmful in almost every regard than alcohol; how many
billions of dollars wasted on a strategy as obviously pointless as
standing watch over a civil war. (The simile is appropriate in the
drug war's case: It is America's civil war, and minorities are its
overwhelmingly targeted victims.) Too bad reforming failing government
initiatives is such an ideologically tainted cudgel.

Ten years ago today, President Clinton signed welfare reform into law,
ending "welfare as we know it." If a government program ever needed
reform, the "war on drugs" is it.

Fat chance.

The country is addicted to the bureaucracy of the war. It keeps
prisons in business.

It keeps police departments fattening up their ranks. It lets
politicians on the stump freebase on tough-sounding rhetoric,
cost-free. It is the law-enforcement establishment's bottomless
welfare plan, with more dire results than social welfare ever caused
those on the dole. For all its "welfare queen" myths and admitted
failures, social welfare programs had their millions of successes,
keeping people out of poverty or helping them through bad patches.

The drug war is a legacy of victims. Its only true winners are its
enablers and dependents -- government and law enforcement -- who,
experiencing its futility firsthand, should have been leading the
charge for reform decades ago. But they're too addicted to 12-step
their way out of it.

Rather, the quagmire worsens, implicating America's already tattered
foreign policy along the way. Take Colombia. Since 2000, the United
States has spent $4.7 billion there to help eradicate coca plants.

The large-scale effort is ostensibly a war on coca
growers.

But that's only cover for the Pentagon's involvement in a covert war
against the country's left-wing guerillas. Colombia, remember, is the
third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt.
Most of it is military aid. With what results? According to a New York
Times investigation, as much coca is cultivated in Colombia today as
in 2000 (and it's rising in Peru and Bolivia) even though aerial
fumigation has tripled.

Cocaine production exceeds demand worldwide by as much as a
third.

Street prices, the true barometer of whether the eradication campaign
is affecting supply, are unchanged since 2000.

Waste is too forgiving a word. Folly is more like it, especially when
ready alternatives would be more humane, more sensible, less costly
and less damaging to health and the environment, if you're an Andean
farmer drenched by monsoons of defoliant: Drug legalization (all
drugs), control, regulation and taxation of the whole industry,
foreign aid to farmers rather than the Colombian military, beds for
treatment rather than prisons at home.

The parallels between the drug war and America's other futilities --
in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on "terror" -- explain each war's failure: We
so fear defeat, as if it's somehow un-American, that we cannot admit
its remotest possibility. When defeat is a forbidden option, even
though it could well be the best way forward, then alternatives are
not an option, either.

So we build on errors, as we so glaringly have in these wars. There's
no surer way to lose, to learn nothing, and ensure self-destruction.
It's become a national character flaw that's corroding the country
abroad and at home. If you will.