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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j090100.html
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Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
September 1, 2000
COLOMBIA � THE DEJA VU WAR
Lying comes easily to some people, and none find it more effortless than
William Jefferson Clinton, who has elevated dissimulation to an art form. In
Cartagena yesterday, with the Washington power elite in tow, and Colombian
President Andres Pastrana at his side, the man who "never touched that woman"
stuck out his fat lower lip and declared:
"A condition of this aid is that we are not going to get into a shooting war.
This is not Vietnam; neither is it Yankee imperialism. Those are the two false
charges that have been hurled against Plan Colombia. You have a perfect right
to question whether you think it will work or whether you think we've properly
distributed the resources. But I can assure you � a lot of the opposition to
this plan is coming from people who are afraid it will work. So that won't
happen."
THE INVERSION PRINCIPLE
In order to find out what is really going on in Colombia, all we have to do is
invert what the President said: The aid will, in and of itself, drag us into a
shooting war, since drugs and civil insurrection are, in Colombia, inextricably
intertwined. Secondly, the parallels with Vietnam are enough to qualify this as
the Deja-Vu War. Not only does this conflict come complete with Marxist
revolutionaries, impenetrable jungles, and a country long victimized by foreign
domination, but its unwinnability has been determined from the very outset. . .
.
THE YOGI BERRA PRINCIPLE
While we had no business intervening in Southeast Asia � Eisenhower started it
� once in there the US did everything it could to ensure the defeat of its
ostensible war on Communism. The Vietnamese anti-Communist forces, represented
by President Ngo Dinh Diem, were opposed, undermined, and finally overthrown by
the US government: the assassination of President Diem is today widely
acknowledged to have been a US covert operation. Diem, a Catholic in a nation
of Buddhists, was the bane of radicalized Buddhist monks, who periodically set
themselves on fire whenever they wanted to garner the attention of the Western
media. It was an effective tactic, one that led, eventually, to a US-organized
coup, and also to Diem's death at the coup plotters' hands. Diem had paid the
price for taking President Kennedy at his word. If the US had really been
interested in fighting Communism in Vietnam, they would have backed Diem to the
hilt; instead, they had him murdered. In Colombia, it's deja vu all over again,
as Yogi Berra would say. Once again, the only force that is capable of rolling
back leftist guerrillas on the ground has been targeted for destruction by the
US. . . .
THE REAL TARGET OF "PLAN COLOMBIA"
The Autodefensas, or autonomous self-defense groups that are known in the
Western media as "rightwing paramilitary groups," grew up in the 1980s, when
the wave of kidnappings launched by leftist guerrilla groups began to
demoralize (and decimate the ranks of) the middle class: small business owners,
ranchers; even the drug traffickers, some of whom by this time had achieved
middle class status, were being terrorized. Aside from the kidnappings,
competing leftist guerrilla armies were preying on the peasants, looting
stores, and exacting "taxes" from a populace it couldn't even protect from the
scourges of the army, which would periodically sweep into town and execute
suspected guerrilla sympathizers. War often broke out between competing leftist
factions, with civilians caught in the crossfire. The autodefensas sprang up in
response to the inability or unwillingness of the central government in Bogota
to offer the least amount of protection. Although the pro-leftist media likes
to characterize them as moral monsters, and as little more than agents of the
Colombian military, their leaders are often defectors from the ranks of the
guerrillas who saw through the Marxoid rhetoric and realized that the FARC, the
ELN, the EPL, and the others were just marauding gangs, out for power and loot.
The campesinos themselves organized the self-defense committees, which merged
into the Autodefensas Unidas Colombia (AUC). Their power base is in the north,
where the AUC counts most of the biggest ranchers among its supporters.
Consciously emulating the leftist groups, the autodefensas have waged a
relentless war against the guerrillas and have generally been much more
effective than the army. It has been widely remarked that the FARC and the
other leftist revolutionary groups control about half the country: what is
generally not said is that the autodefensas control the other half. They are
the main bulwark against the final victory of the Left � and as a result, they
have been targeted by the US. For it is they who will wind up being the main
targets of "Plan Colombia." . . .
"DEATH TO KIDNAPPERS"
We are not in Colombia to fight Marxist insurgents, in spite of the nostalgia
this idea may evoke in old cold warriors. Very far from it, our intervention
could lead to the victory of the leftist guerrillas. Indeed, it seems almost
designed to accomplish that very end. As Clinton put it in his Cartagena news
conference: "Let me make one point very clear: This assistance is for fighting
drugs, not waging war." In spite of the official characterization of the FARC
guerrillas as "narcoterrorists" by overheated Republicans, as is widely known
it is the autodefensas who have the most direct link to drug trafficking in the
region. The nucleus of the autodefensas movement was a group founded because
drug traffickers and their relatives had been kidnapped and killed by the
guerrillas � Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers, MAS). The
guerrillas, for their part, protect coca farmers in order to extort exorbitant
"taxes," but much prefer kidnapping as a source of regular income. The FARC's
hostility to commerce and their Marxoid puritanism had led them to call, like
the Pastrana government and the US State Department, for "crop conversion":
they recently held a conference on the subject.
RED FLAG OVER BOGOTA
If we are sending helicopters and "advisors" to eliminate the drug trade in
Colombia, then we are taking aim, not at the various Marxist groups, but at
their only effective opposition � the self-defense groups. Coca production is
an integral part of the Colombian economy, and short of tearing up society root
and branch it is unlikely to disappear any time soon: to target the
autodefensas for being "drug traffickers" is to make war on them, in effect,
for being Colombians. With the Colombian army on the run, and the US pledged
not to interfere in the fight against the guerrillas, the full force of the US
and its billion-dollar "Plan Colombia" will be directed against the AUC � and
the country will be delivered into the hands of the last Marxist insurgency on
earth. Not another Vietnam? Colombia is practically a rerun, frame for frame,
down to the most telling details. Once again, a Democratic president escalates
a war that is taken up by the Republicans with extraordinary gusto. Last time,
we were told it was a "war on Communism" � and inside of a few years the red
flag was flying over Saigon. This time, they're calling it a "war on drugs" �
and if you believe that, I want to know what you've been smoking. How long
before the red flag flies over Bogota is a matter of pure conjecture, but the
success of "Plan Colombia" would make it practically inevitable.
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A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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