ACCORDING TO our Constitution, the United States may not engage in foreign combat without Congress declaring a state of war. Yet, ever since World War II, our country has declared war on communism, poverty, drugs, teenage pregnancy and gun violence -- but, oddly enough, not on Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, or Kosovo. For actual wars, the kind that use military personnel and weapons to attack targets and people, we have skirted the Constitution by developing such euphemisms as ``police action,'' incursion, military aid, and humanitarian intervention.

Now, without much fanfare, the United States has committed itself to a potentially serious military engagement, once again without any declaration of war. Congress recently approved $1.3 billion in military aid to Colombia, ostensibly to help that country fight their

--and our -- drug war. The bill provides 500 military pilots or advisers, 300 civilian contractors, and military helicopters to help the Colombian government vanquish the growth of coca leaves and end the country's exportation of narcotics.

Fearful of supporting human rights violations in Colombia, Congress initially included a clause that required Colombia to prosecute military and paramilitary leaders accused of gross human rights violation in civilian, rather than military courts. Worried about sending the country into a Vietnam- like military quagmire, Congress also capped the number of American military personnel at 300. Yet in the final days and hours of negotiation, political leaders created a ``national security'' exception to the human rights condition and effectively nullified it. In addition, Congress lifted the cap on military personnel and gave the president exceptional powers to send as many Americans as are needed ``in the event that the armed forces of the United States are involved in hostilities,'' endangered by combat, or if the president decides a military intervention is necessary ``for any search or rescue operation.' In effect, Congress gave free rein to the president to order direct engagement any time U.S. personnel is in danger.

All this, yet no declaration of war.

Whenever the United States sends military personnel and weapons into combat, the American people have the constitutional right, as well as the democratic duty, to ask some tough questions of their elected leaders. Why, for example, does the Colombian government require American military -- as opposed to economic -- aid to fight the cultivation of coca leaves? You don't use military helicopters to fumigate either small peasant farms or large industrial- sized plantations.

The aid package must be considered in the context of the strife in Colombia, a nation that has suffered through 38 years of civil war. In just the last decade, the violence in Colombia has forced thousands of its citizens to flee the country, created millions of internally displaced refugees, and resulted in tens of thousands of people who have disappeared, presumably killed by death squads.

In short, Colombia has been disintegrating into what Semana, its leading news magazine, calls ``a crisis of governability.'' Just last month, General Rosso Jose Serrano, chief of police, resigned, citing the impossibility of governing a country in which paramilitary squads murder investigative journalists, judges and police who try to expose or stop the drug traffic.

Many Colombians have some stake in the drug traffic. Peasants, according to the Colombian Environmental Minister, produce about 6 percent of the coca leaves. Tucked away in remote regions, they are protected by leftist guerrilla groups, some of whom have been committed to land reform for generations. At the same time, much larger narco-agricultural interests, who grow the vast bulk of the coca, receive protection from paramilitary units and right-wing death squads.

Two years ago, the Colombian people gave President Andres Pastrana the strongest political mandate in the nation's history. His ``Plan Colombia,'' which counted on international economic aid and promised to make peace with guerrilla groups, gave hope that the country might be rescued from its spiral of endless warfare. Since then, Pastrana's peace efforts have faltered, his popularity has plummeted, and the country has slid into an even more intensive civil war.

Meanwhile, the Colombian effort to wipe out the cultivation of coca by spraying defoliants has all but failed. The narcotics trade has only increased, even as environmental dam age has turned vast regions into toxic wastelands on which neither grain nor vegetables can be grown. In response, the U.S. has just proposed using a new fungal herbicide against coca or poppy fields, which might violate the international conventions against the spread of biological warfare and could endanger the environmental health of the peasants and their land.

It is into this deteriorating quagmire that military personnel will arrive from the United States.

It is hard to imagine that U.S. forces will not draw fire and end up in combat with guerrilla forces. For this reason alone, some of the fiercest opposition to the Plan Columbia comes from Veterans for More Effective Drug Strategies, a group of more than 100 retired military officer who, in a letter to drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, set out the strongest military arguments against American military involvement in Colombia.

Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a strong advocate for military aid, makes no bones about his expectation that the assistance would strengthen the fight against communist factions and ``criminal terrorists'' in Colombia.

On the other side of the political spectrum is Professor Michael Klare of Hampshire College, who agrees the military intervention is aimed at leftist guerrillas. Behind the war against drugs, Klare argues, lies another objective, to protect access to the largest untapped pool of petroleum in the Western Hemisphere. Ever since the Gulf War, in fact, U.S. leaders have turned their attention to the rich reserves in both Colombia and Venezuela.

Aside from drugs and oil, there is also the ceaseless civil war that has been waged by the haves and the have nots. Fourteen European nations, called the Donor's Table, are currently trying to broker an end to the civil war in Colombia. Wary of American military aid, some European diplomats, including the Swedish Ambassador Bjorn Sterby, are worried that the U.S. has pre-emptively begun a push into southern Colombia to attack guerrilla-based areas in which peasants of the Amazon jungle grow their coca crops.

The open-ended U.S military commitment to Colombia bears an eerie resemblance to Congress' approval of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which provided funding for the Vietnam War. Plan Colombia also brings back memories of this nation's covert wars against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the guerrilla and indigenous opposition to El Salvador's right-wing government during the 1980s. Even more disturbing is the recent news that the United States, having lost its military base in Panama, has just signed an agreement with El Salvador's government that allows American military personnel full access to that country's facilities as a staging area for American helicopters and military personnel.

We need to acknowledge that our own war against drugs, started some 28 years ago, has failed miserably. Our main accomplishment has been to cram our prisons with drug dealers and addicts.

As the United State embarks on a dangerous partnership to equip, train and provide intelligence to the Colombian army in the name of a counter-narcotics operation, our nation may be sliding into an unwinnable war against rebel-dominated areas of that country.

We need a national debate about the wisdom of entering a war in Colombia for which there are no clear goals, no exit strategy, and more ignorance than support, on the part of our nation's citizens. Only then, will growing number of Americans understand why only a political settlement, supported by alternative economic development, is the only way to end the tragic suffering experienced by the people of Colombia.