WILL THE U.S. EVER LEARN FROM MISTAKES?

PRESIDENT CLINTONíS assurances that the United States will not get
involved in the Colombian civil war that the United States already is
involved in (with military personnel, equipment, training, financing,
intelligence) make sense if you think of the helicopters as farm implements.

The 60 transport and attack helicopters, and most of the other
elements in the recent $1.3 billion installment of U.S. aid, look
warlike. However, the administration says the aid is essentially
agricultural. It is all about controlling crops - particularly the
coca fields that provide upward of 90 percent of the cocaine that
reaches the American market.

The law governing U.S. intervention includes this language: "The
President shall ensure that if any helicopter procured with funds
under this heading is used to aid or abet the operations of an illegal
self-defense group or illegal security cooperative, than such
helicopter shall be immediately returned to the United States."
Imagine how reliably this will be enforced.

Conceivably, important U.S. interests are implicated in the Colombian
governmentís fight with the more than 17,000-strong forces of Marxist
insurgency in the civil war, now in its fourth decade, that has killed
35,000 people, and displaced 2 million in the last 10 years. Political
violence has killed 280,000 since the middle of the 19th century. Do
makers of U.S. policy understand this long-simmering stew of class
conflict, ideological war and ethnic vendettas?

They advertise their policy as drug control through crop
extermination. The President, delivering the money that will buy
military equipment, said: "We have no military objective." And: "Our
approach is both pro-peace and anti-drug." As though the civil war and
the anti-narcotics campaign can be separated when the left-wing forces
that control half the country are getting hundreds of millions of
dollars a year by protecting and taxing coca fields.

The U.S. policy - peace through herbicides - aims to neutralize the
left-wing forces by impoverishing them. But already those forces are
diversifying. The Wall Street Journal reports: "Armed with automatic
rifles and personal computers, guerrillas often stop traffic, check
motoristsí bank records, then detain anyone whose family might be able
to afford a lucrative ransom." There are an average of seven
kidnappings a day, and the Journal reports that every morning
Colombiaís largest radio network "links its 169 stations with its
stations in Miami, New York, Panama and Paris. It opens its lines to
relatives of kidnap victims who broadcast messages they hope will be
heard by their missing loved ones."

Speaking of diversification, does anyone doubt that, in the extremely
unlikely event that Colombia is cleansed of the offensive crops,
cultivation of them will be promptly increased elsewhere? In spite of
Colombiaís efforts, coca cultivation increased 140 percent in the last
five years, partly because the United States financed the reduction of
Boliviaís coca crop. However, the pressure on Colombiaís coca growers
is "working": Some of them have planted crops (and the seeds of future
conflicts) across the border in Peru. And guerillas have made
incursions into Panama and Ecuador for refuge. And the price of
cocaine in the United States has plummeted for two decades.

Will the United States ever learn? As long as it has a $50 billion
annual demand for an easily smuggled substance made in poor nations,
the demand will be served. An anecdote is apposite.

A Presidential adviser was fresh from persuading the French government
to smash the "French connection" by which heroin destined for America
was refined from Turkish opium in Marseilles. Boarding a helicopter to
Camp David to bring his glad tidings to President Nixon, the adviser,
Pat Moynihan, who then still had Harvardís faith in governmentís
efficacy, found himself traveling with Labor Secretary George Shultz,
embodiment of University of Chicago realism about powerful appetites
creating markets in spite of governmentsí objections. When Moynihan
(who tells this story) told Shultz about his achievement in France,
this conversation ensued.

Shultz, dryly: "Good."

Moynihan: "No, really, this is a big event."

Shultz, drier still: "Good."

Moynihan: "I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for
drugs, there will continue to be a supply."

Shultz: "You know, thereís hope for you yet."

That is more than can be confidently said for U.S. policy in Colombia,
which seems barren of historical sense. "The enduring achievement of
historical study," said British historian Sir Lewis Namier, "is a
historical sense - and intuitive understanding - of how things do not
work." Such a sense should produce policy. Instead, the most that can
be hoped is that U.S. policy in Colombia may, painfully and tardily,
produce such sense.