A NO-WIN WAR ON DRUGS

Clinton, heeding the advice of House Republicans, has decided to aid
Colombia for reasons liberals claim are purely political

WASHINGTON -- This month's Clinton administration decision to supply
Colombia with $1.3 billion in military aid to mount an offensive
against cocaine-trafficking leftist insurgents has stirred renewed
debate on this country's seemingly endless war on drugs.

"I think it's madness," conservative pundit and columnist George Will
said of the assistance package, which included a fleet of powerful
helicopter gunships. "It's an example of the governmento's inability to
learn."

Will said the administration initiative combined the lunacy of
insnaring the country in someone else's civil war with the folly of
seeking to solve the U.S. drug problem by attacking its mostly foreign
supply sources. Even if the gunships succeeded in eradicating all the
cocoa plants in Colombia, the growers could easily shift their
operations elsewhere, argued Will.

"Because there's a $50 billion demand for the stuff in this country,"
he explained. "If we don't fight drugs on the demand side, the supply
side matters."

Indeed, according to Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the
pioneer of this line of argument in Congress, the growers feeding the
U.S. appetite for drugs don't even need much land. He has estimated
that a crop area the size of Queens in the Andes region could produce
enough cocoa to satisfy the entire U.S. cocaine market indefinitely.

The futility of attempting to wipe out drug supplies was perhaps
conclusively demonstrated in the early 1990s when, under a
congressionally approved mandate, the U.S. Navy was deployed to help
the Coast Guard throttle drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Gulf of
Mexico.

It was 10,000-ton Navy cruisers and Coast Guard cutters bristling with
sophisticated weaponry and radar versus inboard moterboats filled with
cocaine and marijuana. And the moterboats won.

In September of 1993, the $1.1 billion a year interdiction effort was
declared a failure by the National Security Council, a White House
agency. Despite record drug seizures, the Council concluded in a
report, the interdiction effort had made hardly a dent in supplies, or
even the quality of supplies.

Moynihan, one of a few members of Congress who opposed the military
interdiction effort, had already confirmed his suspicions about the
absurdity of the campaign a year earlier when he visited a Coast Guard
vessel on duty in the Caribbean. "Their radar had been going all night,
and finally they had their prey," the senator recalled for reporters.

The heavily armed, state-of-the-art ship of the line was about to
pounce on a marijuana boat, he explained.

The interdiction program also featured behemoth AWACS planes -- of the
kind used to coordinate attacks on Iraq in the Persian Gulf War --
chasing Piper Cubs and other tiny aircraft typically used by drug
smugglers around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

To shift the emphasis to reducing demand, Moynihan pushed legislation
through Congress in 1990 requiring that two out of every three dollars
allocated for the war on drugs be spent on drug treatment. But although
then President Bush signed the measure, it was largely ignored in his
administration. Clinton's has followed suit.

In the case of Columbia, the president has argued that the U.S.-backed
military initiative against the cocoa growers and their Marxist
guerrilla protectors and partners is necessary to salvage the South
American nation's current democraticly elected government. "Democracy
is under attack," he declared this week as he paid a call to the strife-
torn country this week.

The president had been under pressure to supply the military aid to
Columbia from senior House Republicans, including International
Relations Committee Chairman Ben Gilman of Orange County. For the past
year, they have been warning Clinton that, through his inaction, he
risked going down in history as the president who "lost" Colombia.

But now that he has agreed to the aid package, Clinton has come under
fire from liberal pundits here. They are accusing him of approving the
assistance out of purely domestic political motives -- to prevent the
the Republicans from labeling his administration and Al Gore as "soft
on drugs" on the eve of the November election.

In addition, the liberals are upset that Clinton okayed the aid despite
evidence that the Colombian military has been guilty of human rights
violations, including the deployment of death squads against civilian
supporters of the Marxist insurgents.