The Salvador Option -- an end to the "cost-free equation"

Catholic Nuns in El Salvador
Originally uploaded by vegacura.

In the debacle that is Iraq, the Bush administration has managed to successfully reenact both the Vietnam war quagmire and the disastrous U.S. occupation of the Philippines.

And now they're conjuring up another blast from our most discredited past -- the Reagan administration's support and funding of Salvadoran death squads.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success -- despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

"Utterly gratuitous," huh. Perhaps -- unlikely, but perhaps -- the neocon Negroponte knew nothing of the death squads or the Contra scandal at the time, but isn't it strange that we'd be considering using such forces in the two regions of the world where he has welded enormous influence? Just thinking, you know.

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers [my emphasis], even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

[...]

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

Forget, for a moment, the civilians who are going to fatally find themselves between the anti-insurgent squads and the insurgents themselves, but isn't this a recipe for what we've most feared would happen in Iraq: a civil war fought between the three ethnic groups? Is there a special wing in the White House for holding the criminally insane in this administration?

Billmon bellies up to the bar for a rare occasion and gives us a brief history lesson on how we spent the 1980s in Latin America. It is telling that conservatives continue to claim what a success our policies and actions were in El Salvador. It brings me to the conclusion that many conservatives share a trait with the Islamofascists. In the view of both there are no "innocent" civilians -- let God sort 'em out.

Well, at least in Iraq we don't have to worry 'bout no nosy Archbishops, nuns, or Jesuit priests to get in the way.