U.S. policy makers edge toward war

'Help' Has Come To Mean Missiles

DECISIONS, decisions! Where should we go to war next? It looks like
Montenegro. Or maybe Colombia.

Montenegro, as you know, is not a country, but rather a member of the
Yugoslav Federation -- the same as Serbia. Except that Montenegro, which is
now demanding independence, has only 500,000 people. It cannot defend
itself against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, much less break away as a
separate country.

Unless we help. Ah, there's the rub.

Well, we, or rather NATO, do have troops all around there: 50,000 in Bosnia
and 30,000 in Kosovo, which was only a Yugoslav province when we decided to
go to war there. And, of course, we have those B-2 bombers in Missouri,
which know the way to the Balkans.

Newsday, the newspaper out on the crowded but peaceful tip of Long Island,
seems to be leaning toward intervening there. The lead editorial on
Wednesday was headlined: ``Next, Montenegro? If it breaks from Yugoslavia,
America and NATO may well have to come to its aid.''

Indeed. We decided we could stabilize the endless and complicated civil
wars of the Balkans. That could take a lot of time.

Back in the big city, the New York Times seems to be looking toward war in
Colombia, the third-largest country in South America. Or, at least, it
published a demi-manifesto by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright last
Tuesday under the headlines: "Colombia's Struggles and How We Can Help.
Supporting a troubled nation means more than drug interdiction.''

What more, you may ask? What more than the five soldiers who died in an
airplane crash there last month? What more than $289 million in security
aid, second only to what we send to Israel and Egypt as a Mideast peace
package deal?

Secretary Albright describes Colombia as the most troubled country on its
continent. That is certainly true. The civil wars there, which have been
going on for 35 or 50 years, depending on whom you ask, do not even much
involve the elected government at this point in the country's troubled
history. Rebel armies are fighting each other, right-wing paramilitaries
linked perhaps to the Colombian army against two forces of left-wing
guerrillas, which control huge areas of the country. Some of the guerrilla
strongholds are only 25 miles from the capital city, Bogota. At least a
million people are displaced and living off the land, sometimes in daily
fear of their lives.

The short way of saying the above is that neither the American nor the
Colombian government is sure that elected officials control the army.

All sides (and the government, too) are connected and financed in some
degree by the narcotics trade to the "North Star,'' which is what
Colombians called the United States in earlier times. That was after
President Theodore Roosevelt sort of took away part of their country,
called it Panama, and built a canal across it from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.

That narcotics trade, according to U.S. numbers, accounts for more than 80
percent of the cocaine and much of the heroin so self-destructively prized
by Americans. We have 200 American military trainers in-country already
because of drugs. The five soldiers killed were trainers. Our drug czar,
Barry McCaffrey, wants to send $600 million more as part of a global
increase of $1 billion in new drug aid.

It is not clear, at least to me, exactly what Secretary Albright is
proposing. She ends her tract by saying: "Colombia's people are engaged in
a vital test of democracy, a test they must pass themselves. But they
should know that we understand the many dimensions and long-term nature of
the problems they face, and that we will do all we can to help them.''

In the old days, words like that meant send in the Marines. Recently, they
have meant send in Cruise missiles. But something is going to happen there,
in Colombia -- or in Montenegro. What we do probably depends on which one
gets to us first on television with horrific pictures of people who look
like us -- but are not.