DRUG WAR A FUTILE GESTURE

Yesterday President Clinton made a brief and well-guarded visit to this
hemisphere's meanest rathole.

He took with him $1.3 billion, a gift procured from American taxpayers on
behalf of the Colombian people, whose leaders have promised to use it to
keep fighting the war against cocaine that has brought Colombian society to
its knees and cost the U.S. treasury billions and billions.

All without stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S., whose citizens are
disinclined to stop using drugs.

The money is not supposed to be used to fight the Marxist rebels who are
waging a civil war in Colombia. That would smack of Vietnam. In our
backyard.

But anymore the drug war and the civil war are the same, as interchangeable
as a four-piece suit from Penney's.

It speaks to Colombia's desperate situation that Clinton didn't visit the
capital, Bogota, which is far inland and subject to the whims of bands of
rebels, drug lords and right-wing paramilitaries that kill and blow things
up at will.

Instead he went to a resort island on the Caribbean coast, where security
forces had a chance of keeping him alive.

The Marxist rebels who have been waging war for 20 years are now part and
parcel to the drug trade, using the revenue to buy the guns that let them
control 40 percent of the countryside and plant a bomb in Bogota whenever
they please.

In fact the rebels set off a bomb the day before Clinton's arrival just to
remind everybody that they could. When and where they choose.

American politicians being what they are, which is to say shortsighted and
conniving, both Democrats and Republicans agreed to pump the new money into
Colombia.

The infusion will buy Colombia 60 new helicopters for drug patrols, train
and pay its notoriously corrupt police and military, and buy pesticides and
untested fungicides to spray on coca plants.

If there is any left over it is supposed to help find alternatives for the
mountain peasants who grow coca as their only cash crop.

If, that is, the drug lords and rebels let them grow something else, which
everybody, including America's politicians, knows they won't.

The $1.3 billion can also be seen as an in-kind campaign contribution to
Congress for its re-election effort.

The appearance of renewing the war on drugs will make Clinton -- and by
extension Al Gore and Democrats who favor the idea -- look tough on crime.

It will rob George W. Bush, who is now done with mind-altering substances,
of a chance to paint the still-fond-of-the-occasional-glass-of-wine Clinton
as a softy on the drug war front.

But on the other hand, money for Colombia will let incumbent Republican Bush
backers claim they are trying to save an embattled democracy while keeping
American kids sober enough to make their time in school worthwhile.

The sad reality is that pumping billions into Colombia is a futile gesture.
The country is a lost cause.

More aid only prolongs the inevitable, which is anarchy. Those kids who were
in the streets recently preaching anarchy in Seattle, Philadelphia and L.A.
should hop a flight to Colombia. They will get a bellyful of anarchy in
short order and maybe a bellyful of lead.

Almost everybody in Colombia's government is corrupt. The decent are dead or
marked for death.

The police and army have killed more innocent civilians than they have
rebels or narcotraffickers.

The right-wing paramilitaries the rich hire to protect their property from
the rebels have, together with the rebels, killed more innocent people than
one another.

The rich and the smart are fleeing Colombia in droves. They are setting up
new businesses in Miami and Montreal, San Salvador and Sydney. Safe places
far from the threats of kidnappers, assassins, the police, the rebels, the
drug cartels and the 20 percent of Colombians who are unemployed and who
will, if they must, steal or do worse to stay alive. Though God knows for
what.

The money destined for Colombia would be better spent here at home.

As a for-instance or two, helping uninsured Americans pay their medical
expenses and horrendous prescription drug bills; or treating the
drug-addicted rather than putting them in prison, which costs taxpayers far
more than treatment and doesn't cure the problem.

Even if the Colombian and U.S. governments had unlimited billions to throw
into curbing the drug trade, production would simply shift across jungle
borders into other countries, like it always has.

The drug war is like a dog chasing his tail. A hugely expensive, very mean,
very smart dog, with more lives than a cat.