CLINTON'S BILLIONS KEEP A DRUGS WAR ALIVE

A classic test for 20th-century historians is to enumerate the causes
of the Second World War. The answers come easy. Germany was ruined by
war reparations; democracies were blind; everyone misread Hitler. How
simple it seems, and how stupid were our grandfathers. How much wiser
we are today.

Really? A good test of a 21st-century historian is to predict the next
morass. I cannot read of Bill Clinton's visit to Colombia this week
without seeing the Dark Ages reborn.

For two decades, America has been buying gigantic quantities of cocaine
and heroin from Colombia and its neighbours, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.
Trade in these substances is believed to outstrip world trade in oil.
Cocaine and opium derivatives have been declared illegal by the UN. Yet
so vast is the production, so extensive the consumption, so huge the
profits from illegal drugs that changing the declaration is barely
imaginable. So hail the gods of chaos.

President Clinton went to Colombia to sanctify one of the most immoral
American interventions of modern times.

It is the decade-long campaign to stop poor South American states
selling his people something they so profitably crave.

Because Washington cannot restrain this craving, it defies all rules of
economics and most rules of international non-intervention. As if to
assuage its guilt at its own addiction, America sends herbicides,
flamethrowers, helicopter gunships, soldiers, spies and billions of
dollars south across the Caribbean. Its Drug Enforcement Administration
now outranks the CIA as a power in the region. It colludes with corrupt
politicians, undermines governments and impoverishes peoples.

Two years ago the Bolivians were paid hundreds of millions of dollars
to destroy their entire coca crop. The Colombian market duly boomed.

The latest initiative is Plan Colombia, priced at a stupefying $7.5
billion, of which the United States is contributing $1.3 billion.
Whether this plan is anti-drugs or anti-rebels in immaterial, since
Colombia is in the throes of a 36-year-old civil war financed by drugs.

The rebels now control half the country, including the coca-growing
areas in the south.

These areas have doubled their output, to replace land taken out of
coca cultivation as a result of US pressure in Bolivia and Peru.
Colombia now grows or processes some 90 per cent of America's cocaine
and much of its heroin.

Mr Clinton's ambition is to cut coca production by half, by arming
Colombian government troops against the 20,000-strong guerrilla army.
He is sending 60 American helicopter gunships, some 300 troops and
military advisers and will pay for the usual round of aerial monitoring
and spraying of coca crops.

American troops will not get involved in "a shooting war" unless the
guerrillas shoot first, which they are most likely to do. "This is not
Vietnam," said Mr Clinton on Wednesday, "neither is it Yankee
imperialism." It may not be the former but it is unquestionably the
latter.

The kindest parallel is if Tony Blair were to combat teenage nicotine
addiction by paying Robert Mugabe's irregulars to fire-bomb Zimbabwean
tobacco farms.

The spraying of coca crops has similar side-effects to Agent Orange in
Vietnam. It poisons virgin forest, destroys peasant livelihoods,
pollutes water and other crops and increases the market price of coca
and thus its profitability. Drugs experts regard the policy as akin to
Opec cutting oil production to maintain price. It also makes coca
producers angry for vengeance, which they take with extreme brutality.

The Colombian Government relies on "right-wing paramilitaries" to
retaliate.

These groups, with whom America cannot avoid involvement, make Slobodan
Milosevic's Serb irregulars look like amateurs.

To assist Colombia's President Pastrana, Mr Clinton has even waived a
requirement that the military aid be subject to "human rights"
conditions. It is hard to quarrel with one rebel commander who was
quoted as saying that Mr Clinton had brought "suitcases of dollars for
Colombians to continue killing each other indefinitely".

The neighbouring governments of Ecuador, Brazil, Panama and Venezuela
have all publicly opposed Plan Colombia. Like those of South-East Asia
in the 1970s, they know that when Uncle Sam moves in next door, windows
get broken and people get killed.

All have Colombia's civil war threatening their borders, bringing with
it refugees, lawlessness, killings and corruption. There are reputedly
two million Colombian refugees in the region, more even than in former
Yugoslavia. Smart Colombian children go to school in bulletproof vests.

Colombia is one of the oldest and noblest of South American states.

The suffering brought by the criminalisation of its chief crop is
appalling.

When I was in Peru last year, a local economist told me: "Watch this
region carefully.

It is being destroyed not by Western drug users but by Western
hypocrisy." The livelihoods of its people depend on their ancestral
crop, as eagerly consumed by the West as once was gold and silver.

Yet for supplying this crop, these countries are destabilised and
persecuted.

America is now financing both sides in South America's nastiest civil
war. Its drug users are financing the rebels and its taxpayers are
financing the government side. As any visitor to this part of the world
knows, drugs and drug money dominate every activity.

When Europe stole South America's gold and silver, it at least built
cities with the proceeds.

Drugs are different. By declaring their production illegal, the West
prevents governments from taxing and regulating them. Cocaine and now
heroin are, to the Pacific seaboard, what oil is to the Middle East.
But without revenue from this trade, governments stay poor and
lawlessness deters traders from investing their wealth locally. Most
Colombian traffickers live unmolested in the US. That is the real
hypocrisy.

Colombia's President is no fool. He will not refuse three American-
trained and equipped "anti-narcotics battalions" plus special forces to
prop up his regime.

On drugs, however, he is explicit.

He has been told to cut coca production by half, to bring it back to
the 1997 level.

His response is simple: if not Colombia, "somebody somewhere else is
going to produce . . . this is the most lucrative business in the
world". Nor is the butt of his criticism America alone. "Europeans like
to think this problem does not touch them," he says. "Every day new
trafficking routes are targeting Europe." The world's lunatic trade
policy still refuses Colombia preferred access to the West for its
legal produce. Only cocaine travels untaxed and "free on board".

President Pastrana says what everyone knows.

As long as there is demand there will be supply.

As long as supply is illegal there will be vast profits.

This business corrupts all it touches.

World leaders may find it hard to get their heads round the idea of
legalising this trade.

But without a start on such a reform, gangsters will stay rich, the
poor stay poor and the addicts stay addicted.

Half of Latin America will be politically enslaved to the new American
imperialism. Mr Clinton denies such an ambition: so why is he plunging
into a Colombian civil war that promises to be nastier than El Salvador
or Nicaragua?

Drugs have superseded communism as the bogey of the West. Ask any
general, admiral, diplomat, policeman or spy what is the chief object
of his attention and he will say "the war on drugs". This war is a
mirage.

Its enemy is in reality ourselves. Because we cannot defeat our own
weakness, we attack others as its proxy.

We know we cannot stamp out drugs, so we pretend by stamping out those
who produce them. They happen to be the poorest people on earth.

Was the Devil ever more potent?

The drugs question is a challenge to common sense.

Mr Clinton's backing for Plan Colombia shows what a mountain common
sense has to climb.

President Pastrana may not be America's good guy for long, but he is
worth an ear now. He points out that America could kill every
trafficker in his country, but users will still want cocaine and
growers will find new fields to plant. Already they are looking to
Central Africa. Conditions there are ideal for coca and poppy, and
profits will be lush. More to the point, that continent is less
welcoming to democrats, do-gooders and American special forces.

Africa is the next stop for this mayhem.