That seems to be the bizarre policy being pursued by the Pentagon and Clinton Administration regarding Colombia, where the hemisphere's bloodiest war has been pitting the government against guerrilla insurgents off and on (lately, more on) for nearly 50 years. Human rights groups have widely condemned the Colombian government for civilian abuses waged as part of the war.

As it has dragged on and escalated through the '90s, the U.S. role has largely been to pour money and arms into the Colombian military, ostensibly to fight the war on drugs, but more recently--after Clinton lifted the ban on arms sales to Latin American countries--directly for the purpose of fighting the guerrillas.

There has been only one problem for the U.S.: peace is threatening to break out. Peace talks began on January 7 between the Colombian government of Pres. Andres Pastrana and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Those talks had the blessing of the State Department, but not the Pentagon or blustering anti-drug Republicans in Congress. They, and the army's Southern Command, would prefer to continue the good gig they've got going with arms and the never-ending war on drugs. The CIA is in on it also, with a proposal for a new $5 million monitoring station to track FARC movements. Oddly, narcotraffickers are the main beneficiaries of this policy: many are closely allied with the Colombian military, and paramilitary groups fueled by drug money and weapons have been responsible for many of the civilian atrocities. Those, in turn, were the primary threat to the peace talks.

The net effect is that the chief menace to a country that finally had the opportunity to see the prospect of a negotiated settlement to decades of strife is the atrocities that are continuing to be carried out under the not-so-indirect patronage of the Colombian army, and its patrons in the Pentagon. About a week after the peace talks began, FARC withdrew because their main demand--that the Colombian military make some effort to stop right-wing paramilitary groups from butchering civilians--was completely ignored. War is good for business; but in this case, war is simply good for budgets, and is being promoted by Americans and fought in the Andes basically for the hell of it. Literally. The lives of civilians in places like Colombia are frightfully cheap to the Clinton Administration.