COLOMBIA: SELF-INFLICTED TRAP FOR U.S.?

I often speak to military audiences about the future of conflict.
Increasingly, the conflict of the future about which my listeners ask
is the possibility of American military intervention in Colombia.
Nothing so convinces soldiers of the inevitability of escalation as
hearing their leaders make frequent promises to Congress that U.S.
forces will not be required, if only military aid expands
dramatically. When generals insist that "advisers" can handle the
mission, Sgt. Rock starts packing his rucksack.

Send check, cross fingers

No one suspects a secret plan to deploy American battalions in support
of the Bogota government. The situation is worse than that: The
Clinton administration's proposed $1.6 billion in security aid is a
substitute for a strategy. Our policy is essentially to send a check
and cross our fingers. There is no evidence that the White House and
the Pentagon have engaged in conceptual thinking about Colombia and
the troubled region around it. As with the former Yugoslavia, U.S.
civilian and military leaders are declining to think the problem
through, fearing what serious analysis might reveal.

Despite the provision of 30 Black Hawk and 33 Huey helicopters, the
aid package amounts to treating cancer with a topical ointment. More
aircraft and other military materiel may give specific Colombian units
a local advantage, but they are not about to bring a strategic
decision. We can keep the Bogota regime alive, but we cannot make it
victorious.

The aid package could prove to be money well spent, if its purpose is
to give the government of Andres Pastrana Arango a last chance to show
resolve and rescue Colombia from narco-guerrillas and terrorists on
both the left and right. A save-yourself allowance makes sense. But
any expansion of U.S. military involvement in support of a corrupt,
feudal regime would be folly.

Tough questions

Before we send the aid, we must ask some tough, basic questions. Does
the Colombian government - feckless, corrupt and inconstant - deserve
our help to survive? Is that government the means to a solution, or an
intrinsic part of the problem? Why should a single U.S. dollar, to say
nothing of a U.S. soldier, be sent to prop up a military in which no
Colombian with a high school diploma is required to serve? Plenty of
Colombians profit from the disorder and do not really want the rule of
law. They only want a little more room to maneuver.

When U.S. officials bluster about the thousands of casualties the
Colombian military and police have suffered fighting drug-funded
guerrillas, they fail to mention that most of the fallen were
semiliterate draftees pressed into service, poorly trained and
ill-equipped, and led by the ambitious sons of the lower middle class.
Those with the least stake in the system do the dying. Those who
profit park their funds offshore. We must beware the "Saudi syndrome,"
in which utterly undeserving foreign regimes manipulate us into doing
their fighting for them.

We hear much about the lessons of Vietnam, usually from those who
never served in uniform. There are, indeed, lessons from our Indochina
experience pertinent to Colombia and other conflicts in which no side
is honorable, but those lessons are not the self-justifying nonsense
dear to our social elite about the unwillingness of Americans to
suffer casualties. Rather, the salient lesson of Vietnam is that no
amount of U.S. largess or American might can save a government unable
to save itself. We can only prolong the gruesome status quo.

Colombia does matter

The greatest difference between Colombia and Vietnam is,
paradoxically, that Colombia matters strategically and immediately to
the United States. It is the keystone in an arch of troubled countries
in the Western hemisphere, from the turmoil of Venezuela on one end,
through the Panama Canal, the fragile Central American states and
lawless Mexico on the other. It is at the forefront of northern Latin
America's backward plunge into caudillo politics, institutional decay,
resurgent corruption and murder as a business tactic. Drugs that
originate in or pass through Colombia have done far more harm to
Americans and our society than the Vietnam War. Oil from Venezuela and
Colombia is crucial to our economic welfare.

None of this justifies the loss of a single American life in support
of the Pastrana government. Send the money, but if the Colombians need
mechanics for those helicopters, let them hire civilians from the
blood-money firms run by our retired generals. This is critical,
because while the untutored watch for the dispatch of infantry
battalions, it is the deployment of logistics units and other support
troops that backs us into war. When you start hearing that "the
Colombians just need some maintenance backup," or "they can pull it
off if we just help out with the long-haul communications," it's time
to bring the peace symbols and protest banners down from the shelf.

If the Colombian military and police succeed, so much the better. But
the likeliest outcome is a stalemate - fine with corrupt officials,
black marketeers, narco-traffickers and the broad assortment of
bullies who profit from disorder. The unwanted result of our aid may
be to strengthen the current system just enough to preserve all its
worst characteristics, maintaining the balance of evils. And if
Colombian forces drive the narco-guerrillas into a corner and find the
will to press the right-wing death squads against the wall, the
response will be terror attacks in Bogota, resulting in the panicked
restraint of the military and another cycle of violence.

Contrary to the nightmares of our diplomats, who often cherish even
the worst status quo, the best result might be the collapse of the
Colombian government. That might bring about a regional consensus for
intervention and save the United States from spending or even bleeding
alone while disingenuous neighbors cry, "Yankee, go home!" We may well
end up fighting in Colombia some day, for genuine interests. But if we
do, it must be as a coalition member in support of a worthy new regime
and with a clear, decisive purpose. A new government built around
Colombians who have both courage and a sense of moral decency, a new
constitution that does more than enshrine the rights of an oligarchy,
and a new military that does more than drain the blood of the poor
might be worthy of our support.

The current Bogota government lacks any moral weight beyond a drab
incumbency. Its "democracy" is little more than a tool of the rich and
empowered. Colombia needs a new beginning, not a prolonged death struggle.

The corruption and bloody-mindedness of Colombia's elite drove Simon
Bolivar to despair and an early death in 1830. In response to critics
of its fitful support of the Bogota government, the Clinton
administration trots out one or two heroic Colombians as examples. But
the tragedy of the great Latin American liberator was that individual
heroes are not enough. If Colombians are unwilling to fight for their
country, Yankee money and blood cannot redeem them.