COLOMBIA DRUG WAR DESTINED TO FAIL

The Colombia drug war package that sailed through the House earlier this
year is mercifully hitting some speed bumps in the Senate. Last Tuesday,
during the Appropriations Committee debate on the $1.6 billion package, Sen.
Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) offered an amendment eliminating all but $100 million
of the proposed aid, and instead of being laughed out of the committee room,
the motion received 11 votes.

The surprisingly close 15-11 vote makes it clear that there is growing
queasiness on both sides of the aisle about helping fund Plan Colombia. Yet
its proponents continue to spew their empty rhetoric. "Without a strong
Colombia," said Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), "an abundant and steady flow of
illicit drugs will head for the United States." An abundant and steady flow
of illicit drugs is what we have right now, senator, and will continue to
have as long as there is a demand for it. It's ironic how tough-minded
conservatives who swear by the laws of supply and demand on economic issues
suddenly start proclaiming that rain will surely follow the drug war rain
dance no matter how many times it doesn't.

On the same day as the Appropriations Committee markup, members of the
Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control were hearing evidence of
the dramatic increase in heroin use among teens - the average age of
first-time heroin users has plummeted from around 27 in the late '80s to
just over 17 in 1997. "I could get it almost any night or day I wanted it,"
a recovering teenage heroin addict told the caucus. Caucus co-chairman Joe
Biden (D-Del.) responded by urging his colleagues to approve the Colombian
aid - as if after more than $250 billion in failed drug war spending since
1980, another billion spent on helicopters and military training in Colombia
will do the trick.

While unable to derail the Colombia package, opponents on the Appropriations
Committee were able to force a number of improvements on a spending proposal
that should never have been offered in the first place. Among them: lowering
the total cost to about $1.1 billion; placing strong human rights conditions
on the aid; reducing the military component of the package by downgrading
the helicopters from top of the line Blackhawks to less expensive Hueys;
requiring congressional approval of any additional funding for Colombia.

These changes show that minds can still be moved by evidence-so
overwhelmingly against aiding Plan Colombia that only deep denial could have
gotten us this far. In fact, the Colombia package is the clearest proof yet
that the drug war is the new Vietnam: Behind the scenes, political leaders
will tell you that it has failed miserably, but in public they continue to
call for its escalation. It's almost as if drug czar Barry McCaffrey is
channeling Robert McNamara.

How else to explain the mission creep that is turning our Colombian
drug-fighting efforts into a counter-insurgency campaign - and inexorably
drawing us into a four decades old civil war? And just in case this sounds
like flower child, lefty, give-peace-a-chance talk, the most virulent
critics of this drug war initiative are the Veterans for More Effective Drug
Strategies - more than 100 retired military officers who have written a
letter to McCaffrey setting out the military arguments against our
involvement in Colombia.

Indeed, one of the group's founders, Lt. Cmdr. Sylvester Salcedo, returned
to the President the medal he earned fighting the drug war in protest of our
Colombian "drug control" policy. "The military," Salcedo says, "doesn't have
any clear goals, there is no definition of victory, there is no exit
strategy and we haven't considered whether a longterm occupying force will
be required to prevent coca cultivation."

It's as if we've learned nothing from the military lessons of the past. Or
from the drug war failures so far. As Kevin Zeese of Common Sense for Drug
Policy points out, "No eradication or interdiction program in the past 35
years has had any serious impact on the supply of illegal drugs in the U.S.
Rather than cutting off the supply, these campaigns have consistently
spurred new source countries, new trafficking routes and new drugs."

When we shut down marijuana imports in the '80s, the traffickers simply
shifted to cocaine. And when we put the clamps on Peruvian coke in the early
'90s, the cartels just moved their base of operation to Colombia. It's what
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has called a "whack a mole" policy - alluding to
the game in which you hammer a mole down in one hole and it pops up in
another. The next mole already popping up is methamphetamine - a
domestically produced, powerful form of speed that is making huge inroads in
the drug trade.

And if any further proof of the wrongheadedness of the U.S. approach in
Colombia is required, one need only know that Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright really, really wants the drug war aid package to pass. "He needs
the money now," said Albright of Colombian President Andres Pastrana. The
last time Albright really, really wanted something, we got Kosovo - and with
each passing month the evidence mounts on just how disastrous that "victory"
was. At the same time the Appropriations Committee approved aid to Colombia,
it voted to cut off funds for the continued deployment of troops in Kosovo
by next summer. The Colombia initiative is a six-year undertaking. The
Senate should stop it now before we all regret it later.