The Week - presidential candidates; Hillary Clinton's family background; other political news

National Review, August 30, 1999

It has long been an article of leftist faith that the U.S. Army's School of the Americas is evil. This invaluable institution, formerly in the Panama Canal Zone, now at Fort Benning, Ga., has been smeared for about 20 years as a school for torture and a breeding ground for dictators. In reality, it is a place where U.S. soldiers teach professionalism to Latin American soldiers, which means instructing them in everything from marksmanship to civilized interrogation techniques to principles of civilian control and respect for human rights. Still, the Left mouths robotically that "Noriega went there," which is indeed the case-so have a lot of other bad guys. But if that were the test for keeping a school open, many other institutions would have to be shut down as well. (Think the Unabomber and Harvard.) As Latin American militaries downsize and seek a new mission in a recently democratized region, they are more appealing candidates than ever for our training-and badly in need of it. Yet just before recessing, the House accepted the Noriega-went-there shibboleth and voted to cut funding for the school. This is a victory for leftist ideology, and for sheer stupidity. It is now up to a conference committee to reject the vicious lie that Americans teach torture, and fund the School of the Americas to the hilt.

The collapse of Colombia can no longer be ignored. Guerrilla forces, fueled by enormous drug-trafficking income, now number 20,000, and they are growing in power. The new Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, promised to launch a peace process, and he has kept his word. But the guerrillas have spurned his offers. They are now able not only to dominate large areas of countryside but to threaten cities. Pastrana seems at the moment without a policy. So why should the United States have one? Because the situation in Colombia threatens the stability of its neighbors, including Panama and Venezuela (our largest oil supplier). Colombia happens to be our third-largest foreign-aid recipient (after Israel and Egypt), but few Americans know it: President Clinton is allergic to discussing the use of military force in the region, and most Democrats are more concerned about human-rights violations by the Colombian army than about the country's fall into anarchy or guerrilla control. Any hint of sending in the Marines would probably scare Americans more than the guerrillas, and such an action is, in any case, unnecessary. What is needed is a major program of enlarging, equipping, and training the Colombian army, for until it can beat the guerrillas they will have no incentive to negotiate. Meanwhile, the least useful debate in the United States will concern whether Colombia is like Vietnam or El Salvador or . . . What Colombia is, is a dangerous mess, and the sooner we assure Bogota that we will back a realistic policy of vanquishing the guerrillas, the better.

The administration's gloating about its hand in electing Ehud Barak (see David Bar-Illan, "Why Bibi Fell," June 14) has come to an abrupt end. Barak is now proving as tough a negotiator as his much-maligned predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet the administration is so much in the habit of acting as Yasir Arafat's lawyer, it finds itself blocking the most important diplomatic initiatives put forward by its erstwhile fair-haired boy. Barak, on his mid-July visit to Washington, pleaded for U.S. support for a change in procedure. He, like Netanyahu, disdains the politically painful incremental withdrawals required in the Oslo and Wye accords and would prefer to move directly to the final negotiation on the core issues. But Arafat says no, and the U.S. will not stand up to him-even for Barak.