With Colin Powell about to become the next Secretary of State, I have less concern about the United States following a disastrous path in Colombia. Last year the Congress and the Clinton Administration approved a $1.3 billion aid plan to help Colombia deal with the narcotics traffic. The problem is that the narco trade is totally aligned with the Colombian guerrillas who control some 40 percent of the country. It is really impossible to fight drugs without getting directly involved in guerrilla warfare.

Recently, Congressman Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Affairs Committee, called for a reassessment of military aid to Colombia. So far that plea has not resonated in the White House.

For the last seven years, the Clinton Administration has been asleep at the switch in terms of foreign policy toward Central and South America. And incremental escalation in Colombia against drugs or the left wing guerrillas similar to the steps taken with regard to Vietnam, will not solve anything. Colombian drugs have been a problem for decades. No president, Republican or Democratic, has been able to effectively interdict the flow of Colombian drugs into the United States.

Without Panamanian bases from which to fly surveillance and interdiction flights, the US military was forced to move to Colombia and Ecuador. As I write this, contractors are secretly building surveillance facilities in those two countries for the United States to operate. They are not defended. I have to ask, what will happen when the first such facility is overrun by guerrillas? Unless we take a hard look at this process, we are clearly headed down a slithering incline to a potential repeat of Vietnam.

We must be concerned about drugs flowing from Colombia, and we also have to be concerned about the drug dealers who are directly tied to the guerrillas working to overthrow the government of Colombia. What concerns me the most is the administration's planned incremental Colombian escalation without a realistic scheme to win either the drug or guerrilla wars. Simply stated, we should never intervene unless we are prepared to use overwhelming firepower to end the involvement quickly and also have a clear exit strategy. Neither is present in the administration's current approach to Colombia.

Let us hope that the Bush Administration will re-evaluate our involvement in Colombia. The last thing we need, as a nation, is to be endlessly bogged down in a guerrilla war disguised as a "war on drugs."