In Colombia earlier this week, amid a flurry of reports of a breakdown in the peace process and emergency military aid, reporters for the RCN radio network surveyed public attitudes towards a possible invasion. Of the 1,963 people questioned at random in 41 cities across Colombia, 66.1 per cent said that they favoured the arrival of US troops on Colombian soil. Fewer than one-third were opposed.
Peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas are unravelling. Negotiations scheduled to have begun this week were postponed indefinitely last weekend. As so often in Colombia, the deal-breaker was intimately linked to abuses of human rights and drugs.
Recent revelations that the FARC had exploited its control of "the detente zone" to commit atrocities and increase its stake in the drug trade had deeply embarrassed the government.
The establishment of an international verification commission with the authority and credibility to protect the integrity of the zone and its inhabitants became a crucial, non-negotiable prerequisite to further talks.
The FARC would have none of it. Though the door is still ajar - a further meeting was scheduled for July 30th - the dynamic in Bogota and in Washington is now moving rapidly towards full-scale resumption of the insurgency war.
Yet those Colombians who hope to see the marines storming the Colombian beaches to rescue them will have a long wait. The Americans landed in Colombia many years ago. From a network of listening posts and radar stations around the country, built and manned by US technicians, the US will provide the technology and the intelligence for the coming war. The Colombians will provide the bodies and the blood.
Last week, just days after the Colombian army surprisingly stopped a fierce guerrilla offensive cold in its tracks - with the help, for the first time in a battle situation, of US intelligence - the Colombian defence minister and the army chief of staff came to Washington to ask for half a billion dollars in emergency military aid over the next two years.
Next came Gen McCaffrey, the White House "Drug Czar". The general's two-year, intensive aerial fumigation programme in Colombia is a shambles. A recent report to Congress admits that coca production increased 50 per cent in the last two years, while spraying herbicide on the peasants' land has become a failsafe way to recruit for the FARC.
But Gen McCaffrey wants more money - a cool $1 billion - to "support the Colombian government as it attempts to reassert democratic control over its drug producing regions." For the cruel truth is in the statistics: Colombia produces 80 per cent of the cocaine and 70 per cent of the heroin reaching American streets.
In testimony before Congress last week, the US general responsible for hemispheric security, Gen Charles Wilhelm, C-in-C US Southern Command, had this to say: "By my definition, illegal drugs are a weapon of mass destruction and should be treated as such."
It was Gen Wesley Clark who first used the phrase "a failing state" in relation to Colombia two years ago. Now the collapse of the peace process, accompanied by the gathering strength of the FARC and the paramilitaries, the increasing involvement of both in the drug trade, and the weakness of the democratic government, also threaten to destabilise Colombia's neighbours, the Panama Canal, and the region at large.
Opposition politicians yesterday accused President Andres Pastrana of favouring all-out war against FARC because of recent statements that indicate a tougher stance on the rebels.