"I SENSE . . . FUTURE AWKWARD DIPLOMACY . . . AND 'HEARTFELT' APOLOGIES, CAPTAIN"

BOGOTA, Colombia, Aug. 19 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on a one-day visit to Colombia, said today that the United States would support Colombia in resuming a policy that allows Colombian fighter pilots to shoot down planes suspected of ferrying drugs or force them to land.

Such a policy, which has been criticized by human rights groups, was suspended in Colombia and Peru after a Peruvian jet fighter mistakenly shot down a private plane carrying American missionaries, killing two people, one an infant, in 2001. (full story)

This, uh, doesn't inspire confidence. At best, at very best, this seems like a typical plan for the Bush types to endorse, in that it won't necessarily improve the situation (given the many-headed hydra that is the drug trade), while at the same time giving us objective "results" to look at, in the form of blown-up airplanes. It's the drug-war equivalent of Bush invading a country that didn't do anything to us just so he could get that flight-suit photo-op. And perhaps it's a miniscule step up from defoliation. At worst, however, it sets the stage for another potential mistake, like the above 2001 incident, only now the blood would more objectively be on administration hands.

And in the wake of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians and others, this statement on Colombia doesn't inspire much confidence either...

A White House statement said President Bush had determined that Colombia had since "put in place appropriate procedures to protect against loss of innocent life."

The announcement did not specify those safeguards, but American officials said they would include radio or visual contact, first trying to force suspect planes to land, and then firing warning shots. Only as a last resort, American officials said, would a plane be downed.

It's the equivalent of if Madeline Albright had told our pilots based in Italy to fly low in the Alps to destroy cables from which terrorist hideouts may hang, but also to "put in place appropriate procedures" to not destroy civilian gondolas.

(Strained metaphor? -ed. Oh, bite me. My point is that unlike the Italy incident, this time our government is complicit in potentially reckless and murderous behavior in Colombia. Old habits die hard for us in Central/South Amer., I suppose.)