After entering office in January of 1993, bombing Iraq and later killing hundreds if not thousands of Somalis the same year, Clinton and his foreign policy team never abandoned the use of military aggression.
In 1995, it provided military planners and advisers for Croatia's brutal and genocidal Operation Storm, and led NATO's bombing of Bosnian Serb targets, including retreating troops and refugee columns following them, leaving what is now the Bosnian Serb Republic strewn with depleted uranium and an epidemic of cancer cases.
Three years later, it launched cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan and on December 16, 1998 began Operation Desert Fox, a deadly four-day assault on Iraq with 250 airstrikes and over 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles - the evening before scheduled impeachment proceedings against Clinton in the US Congress.
The following year, the administration's use of military aggression reached its apex with the 78-day US-led NATO assault against Yugoslavia, the first military attack against a European nation since Hitler's and Mussolini's from 1939 onward.
The administration's Parthian shot was Plan Colombia in 2000.
Colombia's President Pastrana conceived of a project the preceding year, 1999, that the White House redesigned for its own purposes.
As former US ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, sacked by the Reagan administration in 1981 in preparation for unleashing its death squad and Contra wars in Central America, wrote after the US Congress passed Plan Colombia in June of 2000:
"If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, there's no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels. Quite the contrary. (President Pastrana) says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians." [5]
An alternative American press wire reported that, "In early 1999, the Pastrana administration began peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest rebel group.
"The president also made his first trip to Washington in search of aid against the drug trade. But when he got there, 'they changed the script on him,' according to Marco Romero of the Peace Colombia Initiative, a coalition created in September by 60 local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking an alternative to the Plan Colombia.
"Pastrana's talks with U.S. congressional leaders and the head of the White House office on National Drug Control Policy, Barry McCaffrey, gave rise to the Plan Colombia, said Romero." [6]
McCaffrey is a retired Army General who earned his stripes in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Vietnam from 1966-69 and in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. He was also head of the Pentagon's Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) from 1994-96 and Deputy US Representative to NATO.
"In support of their request for aid to Colombia, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and drug czar McCaffrey told the U.S. Congress that the funds were to be used for 'restoring order in southeastern Colombia.'" [7]
With the passing of Plan Colombia the US increased military aid to the nation by over twenty times in just two years, 1998-2000, from $50 million in 1998 to over $1 billion in 2000, placing Colombia only behind Israel and Egypt in that category. In the ten years since 1998 US military aid was increased a hundredfold.
Earlier in the year a mainstream American news source said that "The Clinton administration's proposed $1.6 billion in emergency aid to Colombia is at least as much a counterinsurgency package as it is an anti-drug measure" and mentioned that "a member of Congress objected to White House efforts to sidestep the normal appropriations process." [8]
Weeks before the House vote, one of the worse recent massacres of Colombian civilians occurred in El Salado, perpetrated by paramilitaries with army complicity.
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