Back To The Future

by digby

Reader Colin reminded me of this little nugget from a year ago, which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

Special Forces May Train Assassins, Kidnappers in Iraq
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

Jan. 8 – What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s 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 can’t 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 November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking “the back” of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than 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 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…

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, 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.”

After doing a little googling, I see that others have been talking about this for some time as the mutilated and headless bodies and mass graves began to appear — a striking similarity to the campaign of terror waged in El Salvador in the 1980’s.

Laura Rozen wrote last November:

So the US is no hapless bystander to the Shiite death squads we are seeing, but they are the product of deliberate Pentagon policy? Is Cambone going to be hauled before Congress or what? Talk about missing the black helicopter crowd. One cannot but long for justice for these guys. Could some forward looking European nation please arrest them next time they stop over, just to give them a scare? A little Pinochet-like unpleasant episode, if not a full fledged trial? Doesn’t this country deserve to know what is being done in our name? If these guys believe in what they’re doing, if they believe it’s in the interest of US national security, why don’t they have the courage to admit it openly? Why are they trying to organize Shiite death squads in secret? Because it would be bad for the US to be seen to be behind this policy? Or because they are concerned about their own legal vulnerability?

Did we actually perpetuate sectarian violence to force the Sunni population to “pay a price?” Did we create this civil war?

I would think that was nuts except for the fact that it is completely in keeping with the arrogance and idiocy of this administration to have thought this was a good idea. The idea behind the Salvadoran death squads, you’ll recall, was to show the spics/wogs/animals that they were up against something so ruthless and violent that they would just give up and surrender. Now ask yourselves if that would have sounded reasonable to this crew, particularly since they view El Salvador as a rousing success. (In fact, the presence of war criminal Eliot Abrams in the White House may just be the most compelling clue.)

I wish I didn’t believe this could be true, but it explains the strange lethargy the administration had over the past year. They had a secret plan to end the war — training Shia death squads to put the Sunni in their place. Shockingly, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

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