AN EERIE CAMPAIGN SILENCE

There is something unsettling about the press coverage of the presidential
race. Last week, President Clinton signed a waiver of the human rights
provisions imposed by Congress on the $1.3 billion drug war aid package to
Colombia, and not a single reporter bothered to ask the candidates -- one
of whom, after all, will have to deal with the consequences -- what they
thought of it.

Do George W. Bush and Al Gore support our becoming embroiled in a three-way
civil war? We know where they stand on "family" (they're for it), but not
whether they are in favor of more than a billion dollars' being spent to
fight a drug war abroad while 3.5 million addicts at home can't get the
treatment they need -- or whether they endorse the cavalier abandonment of
the congressionally mandated human rights benchmarks.

We'd like to know. But since no one in the media is asking, maybe each of
the candidates should, on a daily basis, hold a press conference to tell
the people they're asking to vote for them how they would deal with the key
events of the day.

On Wednesday, when the president and his drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey,
arrived in Colombia for a five-hour visit to symbolically hand a gigantic
check to President Andres Pastrana, it would have been really useful for
Gore and Bush to tell us how their drug war policies would differ from this
administration's.

How much of his own man is Gore really? And how much will Bush be
influenced by Enron, his 10th-biggest backer, which has major oil interests
in Colombia? It's time for the candidates to be pulled back from
pontificating on military preparedness in general and forced to address
specifically their own preparedness to engage our military in the Colombian
army's counterinsurgency campaign.

Sandy Berger, the president's history-impaired national security advisor,
dismissed the parallels being drawn between Colombia and Vietnam -- the
latter of which also began with the deployment of a few military advisors
and more than a few million dollars in military aid. "I think you can get
paralyzed by the foreign policy of analogy," he said. Berger, who seems
paralyzed by the prospect of any ratiocination, would do well to keep in
mind that, as Santayana put it, "Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it."

Nor is Vietnam the only part of our past that should be remembered. As
recently as March 1999, Clinton apologized to the people of Guatemala for
America's involvement in that country's civil war: "Support for military
forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread
repression was wrong ... The United States must not repeat that mistake."

He now proceeds to repeat that mistake. The evidence amassed by human
rights groups overwhelmingly shows that the Colombian military continues to
allow its paramilitary allies to massacre hundreds of unarmed civilians
each year. And only two weeks ago, the army itself was responsible for an
attack that killed six elementary-school children on a hiking trip.

"I don't know if President Clinton enjoyed apologizing to the people of
Guatemala," Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International USA told me, "but he's
all but guaranteeing that some future U.S. president will have to apologize
to the Colombian people for the dirty little war we're about to escalate."

Just as that apology will sound familiar, so does the policy that will lead
to it. Of course, administration officials continue to deny it. "There is
no plan, and there is no proposal, and there is no idea of committing
American forces in Colombia to do anything but ... provide training," said
Thomas Pickering, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. There
may be no "plan," but there are already five -- albeit very underpublicized
- -- American casualties.

Last July, U.S. Army pilot Jennifer Odom, copilot Capt. Jose Santiago and
crew members Thomas Moore, T. Bruce Cluff and Ray Krueger were killed when
their plane crashed -- or, as Odom's family believes, was shot down --
while on a top-secret reconnaissance mission in southern Colombia.

If you haven't heard about these military casualties of our drug war in
Colombia, that was the intention. The flag-draped coffins arrived in the
dead of night, in a ceremony that was closed to the press and unattended by
any senior White House officials. Ironically, around the same time the
administration was trumpeting the lack of body bags from Kosovo, five were
quietly arriving from Colombia.

But if we can't get a true picture of what the future holds from our own
leaders, we can at least look to the leader of the Colombian armed forces,
Gen. Fernando Tapias. "There will be peace," he said in a recent interview,
"but first there will be war. With or without Plan Colombia, things are
going to get worse."

And with more than $1 billion worth of gasoline poured on the fire, does
anyone doubt that they are going to get a whole lot worse?

I, for one, would like to know if our next president has given it a thought.

About the writer Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist
and author of eight books. Her latest, "How to Overthrow the Government,"
was published in February by Regan Books (HarperCollins).