No sane person believes in the "War on Drugs" anymore. This implies, of
course, that our nation's affairs are being directed by madmen, but you knew
that anyway. Besides, there are signs that sanity may be seeping slowly
through the halls of Congress. Three times the Clinton-Gore administration
has tried to push through a billion-plus aid package for the Colombian
military and security forces. Twice Congress has rejected the White House
request. Reports from the Hill this week suggest that there's more than an
even chance the Senate may once again deliver a rebuff to White House drug
czar Barry McCaffrey.
McCaffrey, recently accused by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker of having
been involved in war crimes in 1991 at the end of the war in Iraq, has been
the most conspicuous advocate for deepening U.S. military involvement in
Colombia. In the general's comic-book scenario, the cocaine and opium that
undermine America is being cultivated by Colombian peasants under the
supervision of communist narco-traffickers, who use their drug profits to
buy guns to undermine Colombia's government. Send down money and advisers to
the Colombian security forces to wipe out the guerrillas, and the drug war
will be won.
No surprises here, since McCaffrey used to head the U.S. Southern Military
Command, which has a prodigious, institutional self-interest in the Drug
War, since it provides a nice, updated rationale for the old, old business
of counterinsurgency.
Objections to the comic-book scenario are that the Colombian military is
run by torturers either identical to or closely allied with the drug mafias;
that years of "drug interdiction" have never had the slightest impact on
shipments of cocaine and heroin to the United States; and that demands for
$1.7 billion in military aid would be followed by further demands, then, by
requests for a bigger commitment of military forces, and then, all of a
sudden, and without having noticed, we'd be right there in the middle of
another quagmire.
Those with memories stretching back to the 1980s might note a certain
resemblance between the fight over Colombian aid and the fight about aid to
the Nicaraguan Contras and to the government of El Salvador. Back then,
there were similar protests about sending money to the butchers who murdered
Archbishop Romero as he preached in his cathedral in San Salvador, or to the
drug-running Contras. The U.S. Congress rebuffed Reagan's request for direct
military assistance to the Contras, thus, prompting the illegal supply line
supervised by Col. Oliver North. Meanwhile, the Reagan White House issued
glowing reports about amazing progress in imparting a profound respect for
human rights in the minds of Salvadoran officers best noted for the courage
with which they ordered the rape and murder of nuns and unarmed peasants.
The strategies are unchanged. McCaffrey has been strenuously wooing human
rights groups. Jose Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean-born, Harvard-educated lawyer
who heads Human Rights Watch Americas, has argued McCaffrey's $1.7-billion
aid package was bound to clear Congress, and that the most pragmatic course
is to try and install in the aid bill language conditioning release of the
money on good behavior by the Colombian military. Already, Human Rights
Watch is praising Colombian police and military for improved conduct.
Back in the 1980s, there were people just like Vivanco making the same
strenuous claims about newfound respect for human rights in the Salvadoran
forces. The claims mounted in lock step with reports of killings by death
squads and paramilitaries organized by the military to do the truly dirty
work while remaining unaccountable to the human rights groups. Year after
year, the U.S. press here mostly went along with the charade that these
death squads were somehow beyond the control of Salvadoran military or
intelligence.
The fact that Human Rights Watch should lend itself to the effort to push
the military aid package through Congress is bad enough. What makes it even
worse and even more stupid is the fact that the premise of Vivanco's
"pragmatism" is nonsense. The $1.7-billion package is not a done deal.
Congress may seriously amend it, and the Senate may yet sink it altogether.
The Senate has already cut the appropriation down to $1 billion, with
serious amendments by Sen. Paul Wellstone and by Sen. Patrick Leahy maybe
sinking it once again. The friendly reception being given Wellstone's
amendment shows which way the wind is blowing on the Hill, as regards the
War on Drugs. The Minnesota liberal is proposing to transfer $225 million in
the package from its present proclaimed purpose of financing an attack by
the Colombian military on guerrilla strongholds in southern Colombia.
Instead, the $225 million would go into drug-treatment programs here in the
United States. Sen. Arlen Specter is expected to offer a more drastic
version of the same idea.
Wellstone is circulating an important study of cocaine markets by the Santa
Monica-based Rand think tank. The study finds that provision of treatment to
cocaine users is 10 times more cost-effective than drug interdiction
schemes, and 23 times more cost-effective than eradication of coca at its
source. Yet, one-half of adults here in the United States in immediate need
of treatment are not receiving it, and many treatment programs have long
waiting lines.
If the McCaffrey package is beaten back yet again, it will be a heartening
sign similar to those in the early eighties, when Congress tried to kill aid
to the Contras: that our national affairs are not run exclusively by madmen.
We don't need to be fighting a decade-long counterinsurgency war in
Colombia. Colombia needs loans and capital investment. It doesn't need
McCaffrey's legions.
To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other
columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com.
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