BUSH SHOULD BACK AWAY FROM INTERVENTION IN COLOMBIA

PARIS -- There was a better case in 1961 for fighting a war in Vietnam,
which proved a disaster, than the Clinton administration has made for
intervening today in Colombia. The arrival of the Bush administration
offers Washington a chance to back off. It could be the last chance.

The authors of the Colombian intervention have convinced themselves that
illegal drug production can be repressed in Colombia, a country the size of
Central Europe--much of it unsettled, without roads, some of it
incompletely mapped--to a degree that would significantly reduce the supply
of cocaine for sale in the United States.

They reject a fundamental principle of capitalism, which states that
markets will find suppliers. And they don't acknowledge that even if the
Colombian government--with U.S. support--could suppress local drug
production, the most that would happen on North American streets would be a
brief rise in the price of cocaine until alternative lines of supply were
established.

Forty years ago, critics of the Vietnam involvement who were seriously
acquainted with Southeast Asia, international communism and political
warfare understood that Vietnam's war was, literally, Vietnam's war. The
conflict had nothing intrinsically to do with the United States. It had to
do with Vietnam. It was a national tragedy, but it was Washington's
unfortunate fantasy that victory in Vietnam would block world communism.
U.S. intervention merely turned a small war into a hugely destructive one
for all concerned.

The war in Colombia is already a big war imposed on a small war, but in
this respect, it is a war the United States has imposed on Colombia. U.S.
drug users are responsible for this. They provide an irresistibly
profitable market for cocaine and heroin, wherever it is produced.

It is convenient to produce the raw drugs in the inaccessible regions of
Colombia, in the sheltering political circumstances of a civil struggle
that has allowed warring factions on both left and right to establish
effective control over sizable regions of the country. These groups receive
financial support from the drug cartels, in exchange for protection.

The war over political control of the nation remains, nonetheless,
Colombia's own war. It has been going on in one way or another since 1948,
for reasons specific to Colombia. Intervention now by the United States can
only enlarge it, making it worse, and more destructive, for all concerned.
Yet the United States has already committed $1.3 billion to a military
solution in Colombia. It plans to expand this campaign to the countries
bordering Colombia, since under military pressure, the drug producers and
shippers, and the left-wing insurgents, are likely to move into neighboring
countries.

According to The New York Times, "Latin American diplomats expect American
aid in coming years to dwarf the $180 million regional aid approved by
Congress in 2000." The broader plan would extend U.S. involvement to
countries from Panama to Peru, and possibly beyond. Colombia itself is now
the world's third-largest recipient of U.S. aid, coming just after Israel
and Egypt.

Colombia's neighboring countries do not want to be part of this.

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, a populist critic of the United States,
has closed Venezuelan airspace to American military aircraft. And Panama's
ambassador to the United States says, "Panama does not want to get involved
in the internal problems of Colombia. In the major South American states,
there is concern that U.S.-imposed expansion of Colombia's internal
struggle will not only cause it to spill over the country's frontiers, but
could cause Colombia itself to explode, discrediting its government and
causing its civil structures to collapse.

Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering, the member of the U.S.
civilian bureaucracy most committed to the program, sees it as a response
to linked political and narco-criminal threats to American interests. "I
think in future years," he says, "there will be a broader regional aspect
to this as we plan and propose to the Congress new budgets for this kind of
activity."

Bernard Aronson, who was assistant undersecretary of state for Latin
America under the first President Bush, says the situation calls for the
same level of regional and international engagement as Kosovo and the
Middle East.

That international support is unlikely to come. U.S. officials complain to
the press that "European and Japanese donors have failed to come through
with funds" for agricultural development and civil infrastructure programs
to support what is called Plan Colombia. They object to the military
character Washington has given to the program.

The only apparent hope for halting this program lies in the fact that it
defies all of the criteria the incoming administration and the new
secretary of state have said they will respect concerning U.S.
interventions abroad: There is no clarity to the objective, no convincing
program for success, no safeguard against escalation and no exit strategy.
Will that be enough to change the policy?