Pubdate: Sun, 09 Jul 2000
Source: Alameda Times-Star (CA)
Copyright: 2000 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
Contact:  66 Jack London Sq. Oakland, CA 94607
Website: http://www.newschoice.com/newspapers/alameda/times/
Author: Sean Gonsalves
Note: Sean Gonsalves, a former Oakland resident, writes for the Cape Cod Times.

A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY

THEY call it a "drug-fighting package" for Colombia. In January, the 
"liberal" Clinton administration proposed $1.3 billion be sent to the civil 
war-torn South American nation at the request of Colombian president Andres 
Pastrana.

Recently, the Senate approved a "scaled-down" $934 million version, which 
included the rejection of an amendment "that would have taken $225 million 
earmarked for Colombia's military and put it into U.S. drug-treatment 
programs," the Boston Globe reported June 22.

The Senate's plan will provide our tax dollars for Colombia to buy 
transport helicopters and to train Colombian military personnel -- a 
notorious assortment of thugs who have compiled the worst human rights 
record in the hemisphere. And to satisfy some of the good Christian folk 
back home, there's a little money in the bill to set up several "human 
rights programs."

A member of the Republican wing of the Business Party, Illinois Sen. 
Richard J. Durbin, recently visited Colombia. "You could see the plants in 
every direction, 600 square miles of coca plants. It will be sold right 
here," Durbin said, referring to the streets of America.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was closer to the truth when he said that 
the Colombia aid package was a "close national security interest for our 
country." Indeed. The "national interest," as defined by policy-makers and 
war planners, comes down to using violence and deceit to maintain a 
free-market social order especially favorable for U.S.-based foreign 
investors, no matter what the cost to the general population.

As the Boston Globe reported, the "U.S. funding is directed almost solely 
at the guerrillas fighting the government, ignoring drug-cultivating areas 
in north Colombia controlled mainly by (right wing) paramilitary forces." 
In the foreign policy circles, this type of stuff is called "low-intensity 
conflict."

You see, according to one of the leading Latin America scholars, Gabriel 
Kolko, "the (stark and inequitable) land distribution system in Latin 
America, as all knew in 1961, was the origin of social misery for the 
peasants who comprised the vast majority of the region. In Colombia, for 
example, large landlords helped to write the so-called land reform law to 
forestall the re-emergence of the post-1948 peasant upheavals."

These "upheavals" are addressed in a standard text of international 
security studies called "Low-Intensity Conflict: The Pattern of Warfare in 
the Modern World," edited by Loren Thompson, deputy director of the 
National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. It's a 
collection of papers written by military strategists and scholars.

In Thompson's overview, she quotes from a 1985 Joint Chiefs of Staff paper, 
which defined "low-intensity conflict (as) a limited politico-military 
struggle to achieve political, social, economic or psychological 
objectives. It is often protracted and ranges from diplomatic, economic and 
psycho-social pressures through terrorism and insurgency. Low-intensity 
conflict is generally confined to a geographic area and is often 
characterized by constraints on the weaponry, tactics and level of violence."

Then Thompson goes on to discuss how "important" it is to understand that 
"low-intensity conflict and special operations are only the most visible 
part of a wide array of U.S. government capabilities for coping with 
revolutionary violence in the Third World." Most visible? That tells you 
something about the level of intellectual integrity (or lack thereof) in 
what passes for scholarship in our "meritocracy.

Ahost of other activities ranging from the communications program of the 
U.S. Information Agency to the surplus food programs of the Agricultural 
Department" are part of this "low-intensity conflict" strategy that came to 
maturity under Reagan, "the Great Communicator."

Surplus food programs? Flood the nation with U.S. agribusiness products, 
force the peasant farmers to work on a different cash crop (coca or opium 
farming) on land owned by an oligarchical elite who run the military -- a 
military supported by our tax dollars in the name of "the war on drugs; all 
to stop American drug users from getting high (74 percent of whom are 
affluent and white)? Our biggest national security threat is internal.

Sean Gonsalves, a former Oakland resident, writes for the Cape Cod Times.
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