Note: Although rare, sometimes items are posted to newspaper websites
before they reach print.

Our newshawk writes, after seeing the print edition:
I'm sorry to have to report that this excellent piece by James Bovard
never did appear in the print edition of the Chronicle, and I'm
assuming now that it never will. Another indication that the guy in
charge of the website is even more on our side than the guys
responsible for the op-ed page.

MAP has elected to leave the item in it's archives - simply pointing out
that it never was published.

U.S. TEMPER TANTRUMS NO HELP TO BESIEGED COLOMBIA

IT was not a good summer for the U.S. drug war in Colombia. On July 23,
five American officers died when their high-tech spy plane went down in
southern Colombia.

The Pentagon trotted out the usual explanation: out-of-date maps. Those
Andes mountains grow awfully quickly. Other observers speculate that the
plane was shot or forced down by Marxist guerrillas.

The prestige of the administration's policy suffered another setback when
the wife of the commander of U.S. military anti-drug operations in Colombia
was indicted last month for shipping kilos of cocaine via embassy mail to
contacts in New York. They don't make military wives like they used to.

Colombia has received almost a billion dollars of anti-narcotics aid since
1990. U.S. tax dollars are magnificent fertilizer: coca production is
skyrocketing -- doubling since 1996 and forecast to increase another 50
percent in the next two years.

Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters of the heroin and almost all
the cocaine consumed in the United States.

For the Clinton administration, the obvious solution to this problem is
more U.S. tax dollars. On July 16, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey proposed an
emergency billion-dollar anti-drug package for the Andean nations,
including $600 million for Colombia.

The Clinton administration subsequently indicated the aid package might go
even higher.

The United States is foisting itself deeper into a civil war that has raged
in Colombia for decades. There are approximately 200 U.S. military advisers
already on site, and U.S. personnel are now actively training the Colombia
military.

The Dallas Morning News recently noted reports that "tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia
employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets,
[Persian] Gulf War veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed
operations in Central America during the 1980s."

The United States is providing key intelligence to the Colombian military
from U.S. intercepts of guerrilla radio messages.

Congress in 1996 prohibited any U.S. foreign aid to military organizations
with a penchant for atrocities. The Colombian army has a frightful
human-rights record, but few in Congress seem to care about the
administration's open flouting of the law.

Most U.S. anti-drug aid has paid for chemical warfare: blanketing
coca-growing areas with herbicides from crop-duster planes and helicopter
gun ships. Yet after continual escalation in the amount of spraying, the
amount of land in coca production is four times greater than what it was in
1994, and now exceeds 300 square miles.

Many farmers raising non-coca crops have been devastated by herbicides
dropped indiscriminately on their fields. The Colombian minister of health
strongly opposed the initiation of spraying in 1992.

Coca farmers have responded to the attacks in part by going deeper into the
jungles and hacking out new land for planting; environmentalists complain
that herbicide attacks are a major cause of deforestation.

Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared last year that
the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, "We can't
permanently fumigate the country."

The Clinton administration has intensely pressured the Colombian government
to allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be
dumped across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher
altitudes, Kosovo-style.

Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and
permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton
administration decreed clean air standards strictly controlling Americans'
exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat, it sought to
deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that would be
forbidden in the United States.

Increased U.S. aid will not enable the Colombian government to win a
decisive victory over the guerrillas any time soon. The Colombian military
is renowned for losing almost all the major engagements it fights with the
guerrillas.

Even if the guerrillas are defeated, it's ludicrous to pretend that
Colombians will no longer have an incentive to grow coca -- as long as U.S.
laws make that crop 20 times more profitable than any other.

American-funded drug-suppression efforts have resulted in a "push down, pop
up" effect: The harder the United States works to repress coca production
in one area, the more likely production is to start up in another.

Ten years ago, President George Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that
they were "no match for an angry America."

It is time to admit that, regardless of how many temper tantrums U.S.
politicians throw, the laws of supply and demand will trump posturing every
time. The war on drugs is as unwinnable in Colombia as it is in the hills
of Kentucky, where natives continue growing marijuana despite endless raids
by police and the National Guard.