Murray Polner wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston) and co-authored (with Jim O'Grady), and Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan (Basic Books/Westview Press). His email address is: Murraylou@compuserve.com.

"Who goes in if this thing blows up?" asked Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) at a recent Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on President Clinton's extraordinary request for $1.6 billion in largely military aid for Colombia's alleged fight against the drug trade. "Tell me this is not Vietnam again."

His unease is genuine -- and justified -- and is being raised by more and more people. Far from Washington's think tanks and cloistered politicians and Clinton administration types, Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel put it best: "Colombia's problems are so complex that they make the Balkans look simple. ¿ If shooting people could solve the problems of Colombia, then Colombia would have become a heaven on Earth long ago."

What price, U.S. involvement?

Will the U.S. help Colombia's president fight drug trafficking?

Skeptics are absolutely right to be wary of American forces being drawn into yet another intractable civil war. And they are right to be wary of the claim that American involvement will reduce the incredible level of violence that has plagued that country or do anything to curb the drug trade. Look at the history. One of Colombia's several civil wars ended early in the last century and produced some 100,000 deaths. A more recent one, La Violencia, from 1948 to 1953, left an estimated 200,000 victims. The current civil war has raged for nearly 40 years.

Despite the Clinton administration's and its congressional supporters' penchant for waving aside any possibility that the United States is once again embarking on a futile chase in an endless and bloody civil war, there is evidence that is happening. Several hundred Americans are already stationed in that small country of 35 million people, ostensibly training the Colombian military. But those Americans may sooner or later become trapped in the savage crossfire between right-wing death squads, government troops and equally unforgiving left-wing guerillas who also kill and kidnap and profit from the drug trade. According to Human Rights Watch, the situation is grim: "Sometimes, armed men carefully choose their victims from lists. Other times, they simply kill those nearby, to spread fear. Indeed, a willingness to commit atrocities is among the most striking features of Colombia's war."

It is into that morass that Americans are slowly moving.

The Los Angeles Times reported in August that "hundreds more soldiers, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration agents" are being sent to Colombia with radar stations, and even flying "spy planes" similar to the one that crashed last July into an Andean mountainside, killing five U.S. Army pilots.

Dismissive if not ignorant of Colombia's past and complexity, Washington's anti-drug hawks are displaying their overconfidence in believing that the world's only superpower can ignore Colombia's history of violence, rural poverty and unresolved internecine wars, and make a difference in the country. At the same time, they are denying that American forces will ever get involved in the fighting. The goal, says the White House, is "helping the Colombian government push into the coca-growing regions of southern Colombia, which are now dominated by insurgent guerillas."

"How do you push into an area dominated by these guys without having anything to do with them?" asked Gen. Fred Woerner, former U.S. commander of military forces in Latin America. "Anyone who believes that these counternarcotics battalions will not be involved in counterinsurgency is naive."

It sounds much like the early stages of the Vietnam debacle.

Do we really want in?

The U.S. government has another option. It could work alongside other Latin American states to try to negotiate a settlement between the warring sides and then turn its attention to reducing the demand for drugs at home. But the American government seems insistent on raising the stakes of our "war on drugs." As a result, this country is being drawn into another inexplicable and mindless war between murderous and lethal gangs.

Perhaps blinded by the need to combat drugs, or possibly tempted by Colombia's vast rich oil deposits and natural resources, the Clinton administration trudges on -- as did Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam. The U.S. seemingly is oblivious to parallels with the past while it propagates the fiction that the Colombian armed forces are dependable and benevolent allies.

Like too many previous administrations, the Clinton administration prefers to disregard our history of snuggling up to groups and regimes that care not one whit about human rights. Witness the State Department's just-issued yearly report on human rights that pointed out that Colombia's "[g]overnment forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extra-judicial killings, at a level roughly similar to that of 1998." Still we make deals with the Colombian government. As happened so often during the Cold War, murder, rape and torture are unforgivable when carried out by "enemies" but perfectly forgivable when practiced by "friends" and "allies" in the name of the sacred cow of "national security."

Whatever the official spin, it has the scent of the yet another Vietnam. Then, Eisenhower and his inflexible Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that they were not going to permit the Communists to overrun southern Vietnam without a fight. By the time John Kennedy left office he had placed 16,000 American "military advisers" in Vietnam. Then came Johnson and Nixon and 58,000 American dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, and perhaps a million or more Vietnamese killed.

Now, we escalate our involvement in a South American hell with claims that it is the only way that we can successfully fight our "war" against drugs. Once again, our priorities seem misguided.

Do we really need another military intervention, a renewed draft, mass protests and yet another war memorial to "our boys" in Washington?