'The Salvador Option'

charmtrap · Jan 8, 2005

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagons latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we cant just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last Novembers operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgencyas Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the timethan in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administrations 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 successdespite 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.)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

Read the whole thing, as they say. Really, that this sort of thing is even being discussed underscores how tenuous the situation in Iraq really is. And that the Bush team really has no clue what to do now.

ClaireZ · Jan 9, 2005

I am not suprised they are considering this. Just really worried that it sounds like it could easily lead to war with Syria, not that that would surprise me by the way.

ClaireZ · Jan 9, 2005

And this sounds rather ominous:

"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."

I wonder what their plans are for making the civilians "pay?"

lucid42day · Jan 9, 2005

ClaireZ said:
And this sounds rather ominous:

"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."

I wonder what their plans are for making the civilians "pay?"

Same one as usual, I imagine:

http://www.retroweb.com/rem/lyrics/song_GreenGrowTheRushes.html
http://www.retroweb.com/rem/lyrics/song_TheFlowersOfGuatemala.html
http://www.retroweb.com/rem/lyrics/song_Occupation.html

It's amazing what devices you can sympethize.

Blemonds · Jan 9, 2005

ClaireZ said:
I am not suprised they are considering this. Just really worried that it sounds like it could easily lead to war with Syria, not that that would surprise me by the way.

Hey, as long as our troops are already there. What the heck?

charmtrap · Jan 9, 2005

Blemonds said:
Hey, as long as our troops are already there. What the heck?

Sure, what the heck. It's not your neck on the line. Since basically the entire world hates us anyway, we might as well invade.

FrancisIsMyBulldog · Jan 9, 2005

Blemonds said:
Hey, as long as our troops are already there. What the heck?

Tell me something...would you like sharing this view with a family that would like for their son or daughter to come home from duty safe and sound.

Or better yet...how about risking your neck and going over there to serve our country. Then you can be happy go lucky about it all you want.

drboyd · Jan 9, 2005

Hmmm.... Kidnapping... death squads.... assassinations...

Seems like it wasn't too long ago that they were telling us those were the kinds of things that "terrorists" did.

MatthewG215 · Jan 9, 2005

If the Reagan White House supported death squads and assassinations, why didn't the liberal media talk about it after he died?

Blemonds · Jan 9, 2005

FrancisIsMyBulldog said:
Tell me something...would you like sharing this view with a family that would like for their son or daughter to come home from duty safe and sound.

They're free to read my post just like any others.

Or better yet...how about risking your neck and going over there to serve our country. Then you can be happy go lucky about it all you want.

I've had my neck on the line thank you. How about you.

Sycophant · Jan 9, 2005

The problem is like the one we (or you, the USA?) face with the existing detainees - it's a problem of accurately identifying who is a valid target and who is just a random pesant with an AK-47 in the living room (not uncommon, and totally legal in Iraq).

It probably would be a somewhat effective tactic against a lot of the resistance, but very costly in terms of 'hearts and minds' and actual troops, detainees and most importantly PR. The idea of clandestine squads of US soliders kidnapping people from their homes, or worse still assassinating them, based on undisclosed evidence would not be popular internationally, not too popular at home, and probably very unpopular in the minds of most Iraqis -- even if they get it right 100% of the time, that would not be the word on the street, and realistically they wouldn't get it right anywhere near 100% of the time.

And interestingly, it seems the US-backed quelling of the insurgents in El Salvador cost around 70,000 lives - certainly not all from the 'death squads' although they were considered to be very brutal and quite lax on what constituted a target.

drboyd · Jan 14, 2005

.

Zoot · Jan 14, 2005

Maybe a US-funded assassin can murder an archbishop over there, like they did with Oscar Romero in El Salvador.

Some reports of the actions of US-trained, US-funded militants in El Salvador, from Catholic priests, quoted by Noam Chomsky:

The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.

According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon.

People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador -- they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.

Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self-help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.

"By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history -- and it's got a lot of competition."
- Chomsky

Gil-Galad12 · Jan 14, 2005

Freedom marches on.

'The Salvador Option'

Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn

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