Much attention last week was being focused on President Bush's preposterous "Axis of Evil," and the possibility--probability, even--that his administration will plunge us into military attacks on one or all three nations as though they somehow are related to September 11. Meanwhile, Bush's budget last week, for the first time, explicitly involved America's military in what is about to become a bloody and terrifying conflagration.

The line item in question is a $98 million request to Congress to provide helicopters, communication equipment, and military training for Colombian troops to guard a 500-mile oil pipeline from oil fields in eastern Colombia to Caribbean ports. The pipeline (owned by Occidental Petroleum, a company notorious both for the threatened mass suicide of indigenous U'Wa, whose land is threatened by its operations, and for its long association with the Gore family) has been bombed 170 times in the last year alone by rebels as part of their long-simmering rural war against the Colombian government. Oil profits are one of the government's major sources of export income to finance its war.

The Bush request marks the first time that the US has publicly tied its military aid to Colombia directly to the war, rather than to anti-drug efforts. It came the same week as CIA Director George Tenet's Feb. 6 Senate testimony, in which he cited Colombia's biggest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as a terrorist threat to the US alongside the more highlighted Islamic extremists and neo-Axis members.

To understand the full significance of these moves, it is first necessary to understand what is happening in Colombia. There, a 40-year war that has been ugly but "low-intensity" is about to go ballistic. The years-long Pastrana Peace Process is approaching political death, mired in negotiations between the government and FARC over conditions for negotiating a cease-fire so that negotiations can begin, etc.

They are struggling in the shadow of an upcoming presidential election, in which a new poll shows Pres. Pastrana's designated successor, Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa, as trailing badly, having dropped 11% since the last poll four months ago. The wide leader at this point is an extremist named Alvaro Uribe Velez, a minor party candidate who first came to prominence in the early '90s as a governor who encouraged the growth of "self-defense groups"--paramilitary vigilantes of the sort associated with 80% of Colombia's massive number of human rights atrocities (and funded in large part through the military and the drug trade).

Since half of all Colombians don't have telephones to answer poll questions--the poor, mostly rural half among which rebel support is strongest--Uribe's large, probably insurmountable lead shows an alarming willingness by Colombia's urban middle and upper classes to plunge the country into bloodshed the likes of which have not been seen in the long-running war. For 40 years, Colombia's war has been mostly confined to the countryside. Any Uribe-led guerrilla crackdown--and he is promising one, and counting on US assistance for it--will for the first time bring Colombia's war to its big urban centers. There, a terror campaign by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar brought the country to its knees in the '80s; FARC, with countless sympathizers among urban slums that didn't exist 20 years ago, can and probably would inflict much, much more damage. Which will be responded to with civilian atrocities (a favorite calling card of Colombia's paramilitaries is chainsaw dismemberment) which would lead to more urban guerrilla warfare, and so on toward catastrophe. With the US providing the high-tech chainsaws, and, inevitably, more and more personnel to augment the "advisors," mercenaries, and CIA operatives already knee-deep in the conflict.

The last time Colombia elected an extremist like Uribe, in 1950, the resulting dictatorship killed 150,000 people in three years before a coup deposed it. On the prior occasion, in 1898, the result was the "Thousand Days' War," and another 100,000 massacred. The talk in Bogota these days is of a 50-year cycle of tragedy, and how the United States is not only walking right into it, but encouraging it. Soon, perhaps, inflicting it.

Meanwhile, back in the States, the attention is focused on an idiotic speechwriters' invention (the aforementioned "Axis"), and aid to Colombia gets two sentences under "In Other News." How many dismemberments, do you suppose, will it take to make headlines in America? And--it must be asked in the wake of Sept. 11--how many Latin American sympathizers of groups like FARC now live in the United States?