Scathing Editorial on U.S. Plan to Use Death Squads in Iraq

[TexasLawyer]

From Asia Times

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GA14Ak03.html

Jan 14, 2005

Death squads: A bad idea revisited
By Jason Vest

WASHINGTON - The US periodical Newsweek revealed on Sunday that the Pentagon is considering an effort in Iraq that human-rights groups say more closely resembles a dark and desperate homage to D'Aubissonism than an actual policy initiative.

Harkening back to the days when the administration of president Ronald Reagan and its Salvadoran proxies, led by the extreme right-wing political leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, were fighting a "losing war" with the leftist rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), Newsweek recalled how "the US government funded or supported 'nationalist' forces that allegedly included so-called 'death squads' directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers".

Adding that "many US conservatives consider the policy to have been a success - despite the deaths of innocent civilians" (perhaps the understatement of the year so far, given the low-end estimate of 40,000 civilians dead) - the magazine reported that the Pentagon may apply this approach to Iraq, deploying US Special Forces teams to "advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers".

This may be the best indicator to date as to just how far around the bend the current crop of Pentagonistas has gone in their bid to check the insurgency they never thought could happen.

This is not just because Pentagon hawks are apparently still rationalizing away murdered Salvadorans. It's also because the US military's own scholarship over the past 20 years holds that that the United States' military and political counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador are at best a case study in how to prolong an insurgency, and not an approach worthy of emulation.

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[yardwork]

1. There is a continuous thread that connects today with past decades

The Republicans have been up to this for a long time. Everytime they get in power they behave this way, sending murderers and torturers out into the world to spread violence and death and agony in the name of the United States.

And we wonder why we are hated.

[Selatius]

2. It's not just Republicans

Greed knows no political boundaries. The situation today is the result of decades of manipulation, exploitation, and abuse of many other countries and their peoples throughout the 20th century, especially after the Cold War got started. It happened under both Republican and Democratic administrations and under Republican and Democratic congresses. What we're dealing with is the lust for power and profits. It's the same beast that transformed the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany.

[ixion]

4. sad but true

Chomsky pointed this out. That if truly held to international laws, every president in the last 50 years would be a war criminal.

Not a good track record for a country founded on the ideals of freedom, liberty, equality and justice. :cry:

[yardwork]

5. My father said the same thing shortly before he died

He said that greed was destroying this country.

I'm beginning to understand what he meant.

[hector459]

3. This is so sad.

I cry for my country.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Nothing can stop these people, either, apparently.

From the article:

In El Salvador, the officers found, US aid in the name of counterinsurgency had created a defining paradigm in which the Salvadoran military and its proxies pursued a campaign of "lavish brutality, fail to distinguish between dissenters and revolutionaries", killing tens of thousands - many of whom had nothing to do with the FMLN - reflecting a "US policy built on a foundation of corpses".
(snip)

So damned sad. Nothing has been learned by those who most desperately need enlightenment.