INTERVENTION IN COLOMBIA

Some lessons of history are well-learned. Take the Vietnam War experience.
Deeply ingrained in the American psyche since that tragic misadventure of
the 1950s, '60s, and '70s is that foreign-policy quagmires are to be avoided
at all cost.

Thus it was no surprise to hear President Clinton, in Colombia to
symbolically deliver $1.3 billion in anti-drug aid to the South American
nation, firmly declare that the United States isn't about to again step
waist-deep into the Big Muddy of military intervention.

"There won't be American involvement in a shooting war because they don't
want it and we don't want it," Mr. Clinton asserted in Cartagena. "This is
not Vietnam. Neither is it Yankee imperialism."

Reassuring words, but they still stir the same unease that many Americans
have felt since Vietnam whenever this nation has confronted serious
international problems with military aid.

The government of Colombia finds itself in an intractable internal war,
having lost control of half of its territory to leftist guerrillas
cooperating with coca growers and drug traffickers. The Colombian army,
small and poorly equipped, is up against a formidable force funded with
hundreds of millions in drug-protection dollars that line the cocaine
pipeline to the United States.

The U.S. aid will pay for some social programs but mostly will fund an
anti-drug brigade supported by 500 U.S. Army and intelligence instructors
and 60 attack helicopters. While Colombian and U.S. officials express
confidence that the aid will enable authorities to root out the drug growers
and traffickers, and destroy the guerrillas' ability to wage war, it will be
a long and difficult struggle that probably will require additional U.S.
assistance.

There are risks: Mr. Clinton already has waived Congress' human rights
stipulations in approving the $1.3 billion package.

This represents a major shift in a foreign policy which, in recent years,
has shunned officials who appeared to be in the clutches of various drug
cartels. That the visit took place under extraordinary security and was
confined to Cartagena, on the Colombian coast, rather than the strife-torn
capital of Bogota, speaks dramatically to the internal threat Colombia
faces.

Some 90 per cent of the cocaine on U.S. streets is produced in Colombia.
While a good argument can be made that the drug trade would languish but for
a willing North American market, it is apparent that the United States must
fight the narcotics scourge at both ends of the pipeline.