What A Surprise

Some of us predicted this the minute John Negroponte was named as ambassador.

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.)

[…]

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government-the Defense department or CIA-would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In “covert” activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)

Well now, this certainly explains the ongoing need for that pesky finding that the president can ignore any laws he chooses, doesn’t it? And good old Porter is certainly unlikely to have any qualms about doing it.

The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days.

[…]

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.

Yeah, “shock and awe” just needs to be fully unleashed. Surely, if we just scare them enough they’ll learn to love us.

If there has been a worse idea, I don’t know what it is. If anyone thinks in this day and age in a country like Iraq that ongoing “covert” operations will stay covert, they are dreaming. The details of the operations will emerge replete with pictures and testimony. It will naturally make us even more hated and even more vulnerable to terrorism.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the Pentagon has run out of options. We don’t have the troops to quell this insurgency with any humanity and even if we did, it’s probably too late. The civil war that everybody from Scowcroft and Bush Sr to Joseph Cirincione predicted is already in full swing. The US is in the middle of it, universally mistrusted and widely hated with all the predictable results. It’s a cock-up of historic proportions and it gets worse with every passing day. I’m not sure we can do anything but withdraw and institute immediate energy conservation on a scale previously unheard of. It may not have been the only reason we invaded in the first place, but losing, which we are, means that Iraq’s oil fields are now a battlefield. It’s time to trade in those SUV’s folks.