Pubdate: Sun, 03 Sep 2000
Source: Staten Island Advance (NY)
Copyright: 2000 Advance Publication Inc.
Contact:  http://www.silive.com/
Forum: http://www.silive.com/forums/
Author: Terence Kivlan

A NO-WIN WAR ON DRUGS

Clinton, heeding the advice of House Republicans, has decided to aid 
Colombia for reasons liberals claim are purely political  

WASHINGTON -- This month's Clinton administration decision to supply 
Colombia with $1.3 billion in military aid to mount an offensive 
against cocaine-trafficking leftist insurgents has stirred renewed 
debate on this country's seemingly endless war on drugs.  

"I think it's madness," conservative pundit and columnist George Will 
said of the assistance package, which included a fleet of powerful 
helicopter gunships. "It's an example of the governmento's inability to 
learn."  

Will said the administration initiative combined the lunacy of 
insnaring the country in someone else's civil war with the folly of 
seeking to solve the U.S. drug problem by attacking its mostly foreign 
supply sources. Even if the gunships succeeded in eradicating all the 
cocoa plants in Colombia, the growers could easily shift their 
operations elsewhere, argued Will.  

"Because there's a $50 billion demand for the stuff in this country," 
he explained. "If we don't fight drugs on the demand side, the supply 
side matters."  

Indeed, according to Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the 
pioneer of this line of argument in Congress, the growers feeding the 
U.S. appetite for drugs don't even need much land. He has estimated 
that a crop area the size of Queens in the Andes region could produce 
enough cocoa to satisfy the entire U.S. cocaine market indefinitely.  

The futility of attempting to wipe out drug supplies was perhaps 
conclusively demonstrated in the early 1990s when, under a 
congressionally approved mandate, the U.S. Navy was deployed to help 
the Coast Guard throttle drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Gulf of 
Mexico.  

It was 10,000-ton Navy cruisers and Coast Guard cutters bristling with 
sophisticated weaponry and radar versus inboard moterboats filled with 
cocaine and marijuana. And the moterboats won.  

In September of 1993, the $1.1 billion a year interdiction effort was 
declared a failure by the National Security Council, a White House 
agency. Despite record drug seizures, the Council concluded in a 
report, the interdiction effort had made hardly a dent in supplies, or 
even the quality of supplies.  

Moynihan, one of a few members of Congress who opposed the military 
interdiction effort, had already confirmed his suspicions about the 
absurdity of the campaign a year earlier when he visited a Coast Guard 
vessel on duty in the Caribbean. "Their radar had been going all night, 
and finally they had their prey," the senator recalled for reporters.  

The heavily armed, state-of-the-art ship of the line was about to 
pounce on a marijuana boat, he explained.  

The interdiction program also featured behemoth AWACS planes -- of the 
kind used to coordinate attacks on Iraq in the Persian Gulf War -- 
chasing Piper Cubs and other tiny aircraft typically used by drug 
smugglers around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.  

To shift the emphasis to reducing demand, Moynihan pushed legislation 
through Congress in 1990 requiring that two out of every three dollars 
allocated for the war on drugs be spent on drug treatment. But although 
then President Bush signed the measure, it was largely ignored in his 
administration. Clinton's has followed suit.  

In the case of Columbia, the president has argued that the U.S.-backed 
military initiative against the cocoa growers and their Marxist 
guerrilla protectors and partners is necessary to salvage the South 
American nation's current democraticly elected government. "Democracy 
is under attack," he declared this week as he paid a call to the strife-
torn country this week.  

The president had been under pressure to supply the military aid to 
Columbia from senior House Republicans, including International 
Relations Committee Chairman Ben Gilman of Orange County. For the past 
year, they have been warning Clinton that, through his inaction, he 
risked going down in history as the president who "lost" Colombia.  

But now that he has agreed to the aid package, Clinton has come under 
fire from liberal pundits here. They are accusing him of approving the 
assistance out of purely domestic political motives -- to prevent the 
the Republicans from labeling his administration and Al Gore as "soft 
on drugs" on the eve of the November election.  

In addition, the liberals are upset that Clinton okayed the aid despite 
evidence that the Colombian military has been guilty of human rights 
violations, including the deployment of death squads against civilian 
supporters of the Marxist insurgents.  
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