FIGHTING FOR COLOMBIAN OIL

PUSHING DEEPER into the Colombian quagmire, President Bush is proposing a
major escalation of U.S. involvement in that country's civil war.

What's worse, the main reason appears to be to protect an American oil company.

The administration's foreign operations budget request for 2003, presented
to Congress last week, includes $538 million in aid for Colombia, $374
million of which is for the military and police. Most of this aid, as in
recent years, is limited to counter-narcotics activities -- a thin fig leaf
over a growing involvement in the Colombian government's war against
leftist guerrillas.

Now, however, the administration wants to dispose of the fig leaf
altogether and get directly involved in fighting guerrillas. The budget
request includes $98 million to create, train and equip a Colombian army
brigade (about 2,000 soldiers) to protect a 483-mile pipeline from the Cano
Limon oil fields, operated by Occidental Petroleum Corp. of Los Angeles, to
the Caribbean port of Covenas.

Colombia's two guerrilla armies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), oppose foreign involvement
in the nation's oil industry, and frequently bomb the pipeline. This fight
over oil, like all other aspects of Colombia's 39-year civil war, is
morally complicated and full of bloody abuses by all sides.

To get directly involved in helping the Colombian government fight the
rebels would be to repeat previous U.S. mistakes in civil wars from El
Salvador to Vietnam.

But for many administration hawks, who yearn to re-enact the Cold War,
Colombia is a new front in the fight against communism. Much of the blame
for the new policy switch goes to Otto Reich, the State Department's
director of Latin America policy, whom Bush appointed during a
congressional recess in December to avoid lawmakers' strong opposition.

Reich and other hard-liners are working quietly to undermine the only
feasible way to end the war -- the struggling, U.N.-moderated peace
negotiations.

The new U.S. policy reeks of corporate welfare. Cano Limon produces about
35 million barrels annually -- which, at a cost of $98 million, adds up to
about $3 per barrel in subsidy to Occidental.

Let Occidental pay for its own security. And let the Bush administration
reposition itself as a force for peace, not war, in Colombia.