Green, Colombia's war addiction

General Karl von Clausewitz, the early 19th-century Prussian military theorist, wrote "war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means." If he'd known what was going to happen in Colombia over the next two centuries, instead of "continuation" he might have said "addiction."

After consolidating as an independent state in the 1830s, Colombia couldn't kick its war habit for the rest of the century. Partisan bloodshed consumed the country in 1839-1841, 1851, 1854, 1859-1862, 1867, 1876-1877, 1884-1886, 1895 and 1899-1902, and that's not counting conflicts confined to a region of the country. Then came four decades of peaceful politics, but Colombians fell off the wagon in 1946 and have been at war ever since.

All the conflicts have been complicated. And there have been few knockout punches. Rarely has either side won or lost definitively.

One reason is that Colombians have become world-class experts at guerrilla warfare. Today's field is full of third-, forth- and fifth-generation rebels. They've been using the same ambush points since Clausewitz's day, which is no surprise, given the topography. Colombia's tortuous mountain ranges, dense jungles, confusing river systems and vast trackless plains have always been a guerrilla's dream --- an excellent example of the adage that geography is the handmaiden of history (my apologies to geographers). Yet many people in Washington, DC, suggest this conflict has a military solution.

Another reason for the stalemate is that Colombia's elite is addicted to the leverage and opportunities the unending struggle affords. The military establishment remains powerful, ranchers run "self-defense" units to seize peasant land, private security firms flourish, diverse groups receive drug-trafficking proceeds, employers bust unions in the name of countersubversion, and so on.

How many decades of futility will convince the United States to quit playing the enabler in this addiction? As anyone close to an alcoholic will tell you, the users are not the unhappy ones. Most members of Colombia's elite don't mind the war's inconveniences. They're on a bender.

The United States has the power to nudge them toward peace. A recovery program couldn't take all of 12 steps.

© 2004 Colombia Week. W. John Green (wjgreenva@aol.com) is a senior research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, DC, and author of "Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia" (University Press of Florida, 2003). His column appears biweekly in Colombia Week, an independent English-language website found at http://www.colombiaweek.org, which along with the author has given us permission to republish it here. Readers in the United States who are not literate in Spanish but who are interested in a war their government is paying for but their news media rarely cover won't find a better source of information than Colombia Week.

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opinion

The war craving