A WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME

According To our Constitution, the United States may not engage in foreign
combat without Congress declaring a state of war. Yet, ever since World War
II, our country has declared war on communism, poverty, drugs, teenage
pregnancy and gun violence -- but, oddly enough, not on Korea, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, or Kosovo. For actual wars, the kind that use
military personnel and weapons to attack targets and people, we have
skirted the Constitution by developing such euphemisms as "police action,"
incursion, military aid, and humanitarian intervention.

Now, without much fanfare, the United States has committed itself to a
potentially serious military engagement, once again without any declaration
of war. Congress recently approved $1.3 billion in military aid to
Colombia, ostensibly to help that country fight their -- and our -- drug
war. The bill provides 500 military pilots or advisers, 300 civilian
contractors, and military helicopters to help the Colombian government
vanquish the growth of coca leaves and end the country's exportation of
narcotics.

Fearful of supporting human rights violations in Colombia, Congress
initially included a clause that required Colombia to prosecute military
and paramilitary leaders accused of gross human rights violation in
civilian, rather than military courts. Worried about sending the country
into a Vietnam-like military quagmire, Congress also capped the number of
American military personnel at 300. Yet in the final days and hours of
negotiation, political leaders created a "national security" exception to
the human rights condition and effectively nullified it. In addition,
Congress lifted the cap on military personnel and gave the president
exceptional powers to send as many Americans as are needed "in the event
that the armed forces of the United States are involved in hostilities,"
endangered by combat, or if the president decides a military intervention
is necessary "for any search or rescue operation.' In effect, Congress gave
free rein to the president to order direct engagement any time U.S.
personnel is in danger.

All this, yet no declaration of war.

Whenever the United States sends military personnel and weapons into
combat, the American people have the constitutional right, as well as the
democratic duty, to ask some tough questions of their elected leaders. Why,
for example, does the Colombian government require American military -- as
opposed to economic -- aid to fight the cultivation of coca leaves? You
don't use military helicopters to fumigate either small peasant farms or
large industrial-sized plantations.

The aid package must be considered in the context of the strife in
Colombia, a nation that has suffered through 38 years of civil war. In just
the last decade, the violence in Colombia has forced thousands of its
citizens to flee the country, created millions of internally displaced
refugees, and resulted in tens of thousands of people who have disappeared,
presumably killed by death squads.

In short, Colombia has been disintegrating into what Semana, its leading
news magazine, calls "a crisis of governability." Just last month, General
Rosso Jose Serrano, chief of police, resigned, citing the impossibility of
governing a country in which paramilitary squads murder investigative
journalists, judges and police who try to expose or stop the drug traffic.

Many Colombians have some stake in the drug traffic. Peasants, according to
the Colombian Environmental Minister, produce about 6 percent of the coca
leaves. Tucked away in remote regions, they are protected by leftist
guerrilla groups, some of whom have been committed to land reform for
generations. At the same time, much larger narco-agricultural interests,
who grow the vast bulk of the coca, receive protection from paramilitary
units and right-wing death squads.

Two years ago, the Colombian people gave President Andres Pastrana the
strongest political mandate in the nation's history. His "Plan Colombia,"
which counted on international economic aid and promised to make peace with
guerrilla groups, gave hope that the country might be rescued from its
spiral of endless warfare. Since then, Pastrana's peace efforts have
faltered, his popularity has plummeted, and the country has slid into an
even more intensive civil war.

Meanwhile, the Colombian effort to wipe out the cultivation of coca by
spraying defoliants has all but failed. The narcotics trade has only
increased, even as environmental dam age has turned vast regions into toxic
wastelands on which neither grain nor vegetables can be grown. In response,
the U.S. has just proposed using a new fungal herbicide against coca or
poppy fields, which might violate the international conventions against the
spread of biological warfare and could endanger the environmental health of
the peasants and their land.

It is into this deteriorating quagmire that military personnel will arrive
from the United States.

It is hard to imagine that U.S. forces will not draw fire and end up in
combat with guerrilla forces. For this reason alone, some of the fiercest
opposition to the Plan Columbia comes from Veterans for More Effective Drug
Strategies, a group of more than 100 retired military officer who, in a
letter to drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, set out the strongest military
arguments against American military involvement in Colombia.

Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a strong advocate for military aid, makes no
bones about his expectation that the assistance would strengthen the fight
against communist factions and "criminal terrorists" in Colombia.

On the other side of the political spectrum is Professor Michael Klare of
Hampshire College, who agrees the military intervention is aimed at leftist
guerrillas. Behind the war against drugs, Klare argues, lies another
objective, to protect access to the largest untapped pool of petroleum in
the Western Hemisphere. Ever since the Gulf War, in fact, U.S. leaders have
turned their attention to the rich reserves in both Colombia and Venezuela.

Aside from drugs and oil, there is also the ceaseless civil war that has
been waged by the haves and the have nots. Fourteen European nations,
called the Donor's Table, are currently trying to broker an end to the
civil war in Colombia. Wary of American military aid, some European
diplomats, including the Swedish Ambassador Bjorn Sterby, are worried that
the U.S. has pre-emptively begun a push into southern Colombia to attack
guerrilla-based areas in which peasants of the Amazon jungle grow their
coca crops.

The open-ended U.S military commitment to Colombia bears an eerie
resemblance to Congress' approval of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which
provided funding for the Vietnam War. Plan Colombia also brings back
memories of this nation's covert wars against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
and the guerrilla and indigenous opposition to El Salvador's right-wing
government during the 1980s. Even more disturbing is the recent news that
the United States, having lost its military base in Panama, has just signed
an agreement with El Salvador's government that allows American military
personnel full access to that country's facilities as a staging area for
American helicopters and military personnel.

We need to acknowledge that our own war against drugs, started some 28
years ago, has failed miserably. Our main accomplishment has been to cram
our prisons with drug dealers and addicts.

As the United State embarks on a dangerous partnership to equip, train and
provide intelligence to the Colombian army in the name of a
counter-narcotics operation, our nation may be sliding into an unwinnable
war against rebel-dominated areas of that country.

We need a national debate about the wisdom of entering a war in Colombia
for which there are no clear goals, no exit strategy, and more ignorance
than support, on the part of our nation's citizens. Only then, will growing
number of Americans understand why only a political settlement, supported
by alternative economic development, is the only way to end the tragic
suffering experienced by the people of Colombia.