The Americanization of Colombia's civil-drug war looks and smells like Vietnam all over again. Twenty-five years after Saigon fell like a rotting plum from the grasp of Uncle Sam and the corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese regime, we're trying the same dumb thing all over again. Just as we blanketed Southeast Asia's jungles and peasantry with Agent Orange, we're getting ready to contaminate the hillside drug crops of Colombia with herbicide. All in the name of preventing American drug addicts from smoking, swallowing, snorting, shooting, and otherwise making themslves first very high and then very low with cocaine and heroin. We are exporting the wrong solution to a problem we won't face up to right here at home.
Money is no object.
So the money for Colombia was on rails. It was wired. There was no way you were going to stop it. Too many lawmakers were turned into sausage-makers, grinding up the scraps to serve up one giant kielbasa of a spending bill, pork sausage by the trainload. A drip here, a drip there, and now 60 brand-new US military helicopters are on their ponderous way south, ready to zap guerrillas on the orders from somebody in Bogota.