September 13, 2000 – Bill Clinton demonstrated his presidential grasp on geography recently at a press conference in Cartagena, Colombia where he announced that "This is not Vietnam."

The press conference – which occurred during a brief nine-hour visit marked by extraordinary security including tank and submarine patrols and the discovery of a nearby bomb – was used to announce "Plan Colombia," a $7.5 billion plan to take the drug war to the Marxist guerrillas of Colombia's southern highlands. The White House has pledged 60 attack helicopters and 500 Special Forces "training advisors" as part of an immediate $1.3-billion aid package and, though the bill passed virtually unopposed through the Senate carrying a distinctly Gulf of Tonkin odor, Clinton swore that "we are not going to get into a shooting war."

Colombia's Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), the left-wing guerrillas who supply protection for the drug lords in exchange for weapons and funding, greeted Clinton by blowing up three banks in Cali and a stretch of coastal highway the day before he arrived. They were also heard scoffing, "yeah, right … no shooting," as they overran a government communications complex the next day killing the base commander and 15 soldiers.

In an effort to coax the militarily superior Marxists into peace talks, last year the Colombian government ceded 40-percent of the country to FARC control. This mountainous stretch of jungle and coca plantations in southern Colombia is now unofficially known as "Farclandia" and, besides being the "kidnapping capital of the world," it is the source of 80-percent of the cocaine that concludes its infamous existence by being metabolized in the blood streams of America.

Though Clinton's geography is sharper than the crease in his Armani, his sense of history is as dull as bingo night at the VFW. It appears that he is entirely oblivious to the fact that America is now charging into the same type of geo-political quagmire that turned a few "advisors" and a hundred Sikorsky helicopters in Vietnam into the most embarrassing fiasco of the American Century.

The more it unravels, the more the Drug War looks like a bad rendition of a Tom Clancy novel.

The FARC, now 15,000 soldiers strong and well equipped after three decades of taxing the narcotics industry (netting approximately $700 million annually), are not your average run-of-the-mill guerillas. Some units carry laptop computers and, at random checkpoints, Net-savvy teens in fatigues run the driver's ID to determine their approximate ransom value. And last week, Colombian officials were shocked to discover a half-built military-grade submarine in a warehouse outside Bogota – 7,500-feet up in the mountains and 210 miles from the nearest port. The 100-foot sub was built to Russian military specifications and officials believe it was intended for use as a smuggling vessel, capable of carrying up to 200 tons of coke. Officials had no idea how it got there, or how it would be transported. No arrests were made.

For the past three decades, the FARC has ceaselessly terrorized the corrupt Colombian government in an effort to topple it, waged turf-wars against rival Marxists – the ELN – and fought skirmishes with various right-wing paramilitary units hired by paranoid businessmen, and plantation owners who don't want to pay FARC "taxes." Now that they are finally starting to get what they want, the FARC are certainly not going to let a few hundred gen-x marines with a handful of choppers and some hi-tech toys ruin their fun.

Of course, the Colombian people are the true victims in this situation. To date, the 36-year-old civil war has claimed the lives of 35,000 people (1,000 since January of this year) and kidnappings average seven per day. The government's military is so outgunned that anybody who wants to feel safe must hire their own private army and, regardless of position, practically EVERYONE has a stake in the country's primary export.

Ironically, and in defiance of centuries of historical precedent indicating that armed escalation seldom results in a peaceful outcome, Clinton funneled $1.3 billion dollars worth of military training, financial aid, and weaponry into this tangled jungle of conflicting ideologies, economic forces, and age-old politics – in the name of peace.

While it appears that Bill may have been in the boy's room not inhaling during History class, it also seems that he hadn't come down entirely by the time he drifted into Econ 101.

This was apparently the day the teacher covered basic things like "supply and demand." Had Bill, and the rest of the politicians in the "boy's club," caught this little gem of ancient economic theory, they would understand the basic premise of every black market system in the world: so long as there is a high demand for product, there will always be someone willing to take the risk of providing it for an equally high price.

In other words, if by some magical conspiracy of focused fumigation and surgical air-strikes the United States succeeds in outsmarting and out-shooting the FARC on their home turf, thereby eradicating the production of coca products in Colombia, the plantations would likely move across the border to Venezuela, or Panama, as they did from Bolivia to Colombia 15 years ago at the height of the Reagan-era Drug War.

Had Bill been taking better notes in History and Economics he might have avoided pouring $1.3 billion dollars into a war-torn country that barely makes a ripple on the political Richter scale, and instead, might have heeded a recent Rand Institute study that claims spending the same amount of money on addiction treatment programs would be 23 times more effective than trying to exterminate the drug at its source.

The sober reality of the Drug War is that, despite spending over $250 billion trying to eliminate it, the street-price of cocaine is now one quarter of what it was 20 years ago, and the percentage of high school students claiming that drugs are readily available has more than doubled.

There's no argument that the US has a drug problem; it's just that cocaine is the very least of it. Last year, 5,000 people died from heroin and cocaine overdoses combined. Considering that 450,000 Americans died from tobacco, 150,000 from alcohol, and another 100,000 from legal prescription drugs, the country's coke habit barely makes a blip on the "dangerous drug radar screen," and it hardly constitutes a national emergency worth invading Colombia over.