THIS WEEK'S KOSOVO

"This is not Vietnam, nor is it Yankee imperialism." (President Bill Clinton, in Colombia yesterday to hand over $1.3-billion in military aid to, ho ho, combat the drug trade harming America's cities.)

Well, when was the last time you believed a Clinton denial? Actually, denials are great from public figures. Most of the time, their denials are the closest we get to what's truly on their minds. The telltale sign is usually that no one asked.

Still, let's "parse" the Clinton claims, as the press loved to do with his Lewinskyisms but are less keen in foreign policy. He says the aid is to stop drug traffic. That's insultingly false for these reasons: (1) It will only be used in the half of the country controlled by rebels, who don't even grow crops, though they "tax" them. Army-backed paramilitary groups will be left alone, though they get most of their money -- 70 per cent, says their leader -- from drug traffic. (2) A Rand Institute study for the Pentagon found that money spent treating addicts in the U.S. is 23 times as effective as money spent on "source country control" and 11 times as effective as trying to stop drugs from entering. (3) The Colombian military is up to its eyes in drug trafficking, say U.S officials. (4) The U.S. itself, largely through the CIA, bears a heavy burden for drugs in its own cities. (I know that sounds kooky, but I swear it's well-documented by, for instance, a 1988 U.S. Senate subco!
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tee on narcotics and terrorism.) The crack explosion of the '80s was used, maybe even created, to help fund Nicaragua's contras.

The President also claimed that his aim was to improve human rights, a good idea since massacres of innocents, mainly by paramilitaries, have reached more than one a day, says Colombia's ombudsman. Then why did Bill Clinton sign a "human rights waiver" last week, meaning that Colombia will not have to live up to human-rights conditions originally part of the package? A U.S. official said yesterday the aid was too important to human rights to let some atrocities hold it up.

This may seem more trouble than anyone thinks is needed to prove Bill Clinton Lies, but it clears the way to ask: So what's the aid really for? Colombia's civil war is almost 40 years old. Between 1986 and 1995, 45,000 people died, 36,000 of them civilians. There are 4,300 political murders a year (and rising), and 1.5 million displaced people. About 2,500 trade-union leaders have been assassinated since 1986, in a Canada-size population. Colombia is rich in oil and gold, but 3 per cent of the people control 70 per cent of the arable land, and 40 per cent live in "absolute poverty" and 18 per cent in "absolute misery." The rebels have a social democratish program -- freeze privatization, subsidize farmers, help local industry. They get along with populist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, whose demonization in the American media is heading to Saddamian levels. You could say they represent a mild challenge to globalization, at the same time it's stalled in the U.S. Congress -- and!
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y're not going away. It's a situation up with which, in Churchillian terms, the U.S. shall not put. Send in the gunships. Cue the Ride of the Valkyries. Sounds like Vietnam to me.

How do they get away with it? Here's where a co-operative media come in. Colombia is only in the news when the U.S. government decides to put it there -- by, say, toddling down for a day -- and then defines the story on its own fanciful terms. "Colombia has become a first-tier foreign policy issue, and this trip will show that," said a U.S. official. Once they leave, it doesn't exist. Next day, you can't find it on The New York Times Web site. Count me in. I hadn't written on Colombia till now. What's the hook? your editors will say, or the editor in your head, though a massacre a day sounds like it has hook potential. Getting Bill Clinton to deny his real reason for being there was a major outing of truth in this context.

In case this sounds like doctrinaire Chomskyism -- rational imperial self-interest disguised by a steaming pile of media hooey -- I'd say there's irrationality, too. Talk about addiction, you could call the U.S. a nation addicted to intervention. It's hard to think of a time they weren't assaulting some small place: Lebanon in '58, Cuba in '61, Dominican Republic in '65, Vietnam for 10 years, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia -- have I left any out? Doubtless. In all cases, there are media excuses covering real motives. But there's something else, too, akin to exhibitionism. Colombia, for instance, had already surpassed Turkey as the top recipient of U.S. arms (aside from Egypt and Israel, which are pretty much in-house items at the Pentagon). But now we get the big media buildup to the inevitable mayhem. You could call it the psychopathology of power, or not. Probably doesn't matter a lot to the six schoolkids on a hike gunned down by the Colombian army two weeks ago -!
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stead of by the customary paramilitaries, with the army merely looking on.