ANOTHER VIETNAM?

Latin Americans fear stepped-up U.S. efforts to curtail drug
trafficking in the Southern Hemisphere will lead to another military
quagmire.

Holding up a map of Southeast Asia, the government of Panama last week
sent U.S. officials the diplomatic equivalent of "Hell, no, we won't
go." Any way you looked at the map, signposts pointed to a quagmire in
the Southern Hemisphere.

In nearby Colombia, President Clinton and a bipartisan entourage of 35
U.S. officials were not amused by this rebuff. They had wanted to use
the Central American nation as a staging area to fight Marxist-backed
narcotics-trafficking in Colombia.

There they were in Cartagena -- all set for lights, camera and action
- -- when Panama pulled the plug. Right behind Panama was Venezuela,
whose president, Hugo Chavez, said such intervention, albeit at
Colombia's behest, "could lead us to a Vietnamization of the whole
Amazon region."

Not at all, said Clinton. "This is not Vietnam," he insisted, "nor is
it Yankee imperialism." Republicans and Democrats in his entourage
agreed.

As the politicians once more scrutinize the definition of "is," here's
what to expect now that the Washingtonians are safely back in their
brownstones thousands of miles from Bogota.

Americans, through Plan Colombia and congressional approval of a $1.3
billion aid package, have just entered Colombia's 40-year-old civil
war and have done so with no exit in sight. (See Vietnam.)

That strategic oversight combines with the bizarre arrangement that
undermines whatever good intentions are behind the war on
narco-trafficking. Blood will be on Democratic and Republican hands
long after the Clinton administration expires.

Panamanians can see what's coming. And Panama's president has a good
memory.

Not only does the Colombian initiative evoke the Vietnam quagmire, but
a military escalation in the region would, as Panamanians insist,
represent regressive, rather than progressive, policy. Nations
bordering Colombia want diplomacy and dialogue to end the civil war,
not just the drug war.

In Colombia it's difficult to tell guerrillas from drug traffickers
because sometimes they inhabit the same body. Sometimes the drug lords
use civilians as shields, the way the Vietcong did. It's pure folly to
trust the Colombian military, recipient of 60 helicopters from Uncle
Sam, to not target civilians given its record thus far.

At the same time the Central American region moves toward further
democratization, this buildup in foreign aid and materiel -- virtually
certain to be followed by more advisers and possibly deployments --
tilts things in the wrong direction. This is Vietnam and Nicaragua all
rolled into one.

In Reagan's presidency, when $1 million daily went to El Salvador and
Thomas Pickering was U.S. ambassador there, it was a Republican
administration and a Democratic Congress. Now there's a Democratic
president and Republican Congress. And Pickering, promoted to under
secretary of state, promotes U.S. policy supportive of Colombian
President Andres Pastrana's $7.5 billion Plan Colombia.

In Reagan's day, U.S. funds went to fight leftist guerrillas in
Nicaragua. Under Clinton, money goes to fight Marxist-backed coca
growers in Colombia. It took the diplomacy of the Contadora nations,
not just military might, to get peace in Central America. It may take
such an alliance, not the prescribed foreign military aid, to bring
peace to Colombia.

But where there's drugs and money, there's the potential for wrong. In
the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan administration, some Americans
took part in drugs-for-arms-for-hostages schemes. Here's what has
happened already with Colombia.

In July, a federal judge sentenced Col. James Hiett, former commander
of the U.S. military's anti-drug operation in Colombia, to five months
in prison for trying to launder $25,000 in cash from his wife's heroin
and cocaine operation. The U.S. Embassy in Bogota was used as a point
of transfer.

Supporters of Plan Colombia insist this won't be a U.S. military
operation, but that story won't hold up for long. Colombian rebels
vowed to oppose "U.S. aggression." The Miami Herald last week reported
that U.S. Brig. Gen. Keith Martin of the Southern Command will oversee
the military aspects of the Colombian package.

This won't be a tidy operation by a long shot.