VIET WAR LESSONS APPEAR LOST

President Clinton's seeking of a military solution to the civil war in
Colombia won't work.

When President Clinton announced his trip to Colombia, he said his
purpose was "to seek peace, to fight illicit drugs, to build its
economy and to deepen democracy."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Clinton administration seeks not peace but rather a military
solution to the 40-year-old civil war in Colombia. About three-quarters
of its record-breaking aid package to Colombia is for the military and
police. Like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, Clinton is
convinced that superior firepower can destroy a deeply entrenched,
armed insurgency.

If this requires the continuing murder of 3,000 civilians each year, or
creating 300,000 refugees annually, that is a price Clinton is willing
to pay.

The term "human rights abuse" is a euphemism -- let's be honest about
what our tax dollars are paying for in Colombia.

"They drank and danced and cheered as they butchered us like hogs,"
reportsa survivor of a recent massacre described in The New York Times.
He was describing the slaughter of 36 people in the town of El Salado
by 300 paramilitary troops in February. The troops began bringing their
victims to the town square on a Friday and, according to The Times,
"ordered liquor and music, and then embarked on a calculated rampage of
torture, rape and killing" that lasted until Sunday. The victims
included a 6-year-old girl and an elderly woman.

The Colombian army stood by a few miles away, setting up roadblocks
that prevented human rights and rescue workers from trying to help the
villagers. Last month another killing of six people took place in
northwest Colombia while an army helicopter hovered overhead and
soldiers were on patrol nearby.

Nonetheless, Clinton has now waived most of the human rights conditions
that Congress attached to his military aid package, making it clear
that these types of massacres would not affect U.S. policy.

This war is not about "illicit drugs," and it never has been. According
to our own Drug Enforcement Agency, there is drug-related corruption in
all branches of the Colombian government, including its armed forces,
which are now the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the
world after Israel and Egypt.

The paramilitary death squads, which are closely linked to the
Colombian military and -- according to human rights groups --
responsible for the vast majority of political murders, are up to their
necks in drug trafficking.

Their leader recently acknowledged in a TV interview that 70 percent of
their funding was from the drug trade. But our tax dollars will not be
used to go after them. Our money for Colombia will not help "build its
economy," which is suffering through its worst recession in more than
half a century. More than a fifth of the labor force is unemployed, and
millions of peasants have no marketable alternatives to growing coca if
they are to survive. Poisoning their land, rivers and other crops with
aerial spraying of herbicides only adds further injury and more
recruits for the armed conflict.

Widening the war will not "deepen democracy," but will further destroy
what little is left of it. By giving the Colombian government and armed
forces another enormous blank check, the Clinton administration simply
encourages more massacres as well as impunity for the perpetrators.

There is no reason for Colombian officials to make the necessary
concessions to negotiate an end to the conflict if they know they have
unlimited support for war, including massacres of civilians.

The guerrilla groups are understandably wary of a situation in which
they have no guarantees that they or their supporters could survive
without their own armed forces. Their last attempt, in the mid-'80s, to
put down their arms and participate in elections was met with the
slaughter of thousands of their supporters as well as candidates.

We can only hope that the backlash against the administration's pursuit
of a violent solution to Colombia's civil war will continue to grow.

When Colombia's fate is left to the Colombians, then there will be a
chance "to seek peace, build the economy and deepen democracy."