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The Colombia Quagmire, Part 1

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 “THIS IS NOT VIETNAM,” declared Vietnam-era draft evader Bill Clinton on his arrival in Colombia last year. Alas, while the continents may be different, the conflicts offer eerily similar potential as quagmires for the United States. “This is always how it starts,” warns writer Patrick Symmes. But there’s still time to stop. As Symmes rightly observes, “Colombia isn’t Vietnam in 1965. It is closer to Vietnam in 1955.” Colombia has been in crisis for nearly four decades, besieged by left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and well-funded drug producers. Like so many Latin American governments, that in Bogotá has majored in financial corruption, economic collectivism, and human-rights abuse. The ugly result is poverty, death, fear, cynicism, and despair. Colombia is one of seven nations expected to suffer severe food shortages this year. Those with money wall themselves into guarded compounds or flee the country — nearly 1 million out of a population of 40 ...

The Colombia Quagmire, Part 1

by
“THIS IS NOT VIETNAM,” declared Vietnam-era draft evader Bill Clinton on his arrival in Colombia last year. Alas, while the continents may be different, the conflicts offer eerily similar potential as quagmires for the United States. “This is always how it starts,” warns writer Patrick Symmes. But there’s still time to stop. As Symmes rightly observes, “Colombia isn’t Vietnam in 1965. It is closer to Vietnam in 1955.” Colombia has been in crisis for nearly four decades, besieged by left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and well-funded drug producers. Like so many Latin American governments, that in Bogotá has majored in financial corruption, economic collectivism, and human-rights abuse. The ugly result is poverty, death, fear, cynicism, and despair. Colombia is one of seven nations expected to suffer severe food shortages this year. Those with money wall themselves into guarded compounds or flee the country — nearly 1 million out of a population of 40 million have emigrated over the last five years alone. ...

The Diagnosis of a Dying Republic, Part 2

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Part 1 | Part 2 Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 368 pages; $26. The full extent of the American Empire is shown in great clarity throughout Nemesis. In terms of the imperial, hyperpowerful executive branch, perhaps nothing better exemplifies the problem than the CIA, or “the president’s private army,” as Johnson puts it. Not a blind Democratic partisan by any means, the author lays down a sketch of the history of presidential covert operations as a dismal bipartisan legacy, from the Bay of Pigs disaster to the overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected Allende and the installation of military dictator Pinochet in his stead. Perhaps the most chilling example — and the cause of “the worst instance of blowback among all of America’s secret wars” — was the “CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan from 1979 to the victory of the Taliban in 1996,” which ultimately paved the way ...

A New Foreign-Policy Paradigm for America

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Ludwig von Mises observed that government intervention inexorably leads to more government intervention until the point comes that government assumes total control over the affairs of the citizenry. The idea is that since government interventions always produce perverse consequences, government officials will inevitably enact new interventions designed to fix the problems resulting from the earlier ones. The cycle repeats ...

America’s Hypocritical, Counterproductive Foreign Aid

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THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has been triumphantly shutting down and seizing the assets of one Muslim charity after another. In some cases, such as that of the Holy Land Foundation, the evidence appears based largely on accusations from informants who overheard speeches seven or eight years ago. In other cases, the Treasury Department is releasing no information but merely announcing ...