CLINTON PUTS COLOMBIA ON A SLIPPERY SLOPE

The historic Colombian port city of Cartagena swept its homeless
children off the streets last week just long enough for a six-hour
visit by President Clinton.

The visit was quick enough to minimize the chances that leftist
guerrillas could make trouble, but long enough for him to hand over
$1.3 billion in the name of peace.

But escalating U.S. involvement in Colombia's civil war, which is what
Clinton's visit delivered, can only make it even bloodier. In the past
four decades, more than 35,000 people have died in this conflict.

The rebels aren't angels, capturing innocent people for ransom and
taking part in the cocaine trade. But neither are the Colombian
military and paramilitary groups, who are responsible for the lion's
share of human rights abuses, including some brutal massacres.

The explanation that the new U.S. spending is not about the civil war,
but about the drug war, quickly falls apart in consideration of the
amount of drug-running conducted by troops and functionaries of the
President Andres Pastrana regime. And it continues to make more sense
to attack America's drug habit on the demand side, rather than the
supply side. Clearly someone somewhere will find the means to deliver
drugs to Americans as long as they are willing to pay big money for
them.

Meanwhile, South America's leaders meeting in Brazil last week offered
moral support to Pastrana but expressed fears the U.S.-backed military
offensive could drag them into the region's oldest guerrilla war.

Colombian parallels with the quagmire the United States stumbled into
in Vietnam abound. It's time for concerned citizens to brush off their
ignorance of this distant country, because the slippery slope we're
embarked on is not one to be entrusted solely to the Pentagon.