The Salvador
option For Iraq
By Bill Van Auken
14 January 2005
World
Socialist Web
Faced
with intractable and growing armed resistance in Iraq, the Pentagon
has drafted plans for the organization of death squads to assassinate
political opponents of the US military occupation and terrorize the
civilian population.
The plan, first
reported January 8 by Newsweek magazine, has been dubbed by Pentagon
planners as the Salvador option. It is a measure of the
growing desperation within the White House and the US military command
over the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
We have to
find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents, a senior
US military officer told Newsweek. Right now, we are playing defense
and we are losing.
With barely three
weeks to go until the January 30 US-sponsored election, the number and
scale of attacks has continued to mount. The military siege that reduced
the city of Fallujah to rubble has not only failed to break the
back of the insurgency, as promised by US military commanders,
but has led to its intensification across much of the country.
The elections themselveswhich
are supposed to create a transitional body to draft a new constitutionwill
resolve nothing.
The article cited
the little-reported assessment given by General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani,
director of the Iraqi puppet regimes intelligence service, that
the resistance is 200,000-strong and enjoys broad sympathy, particularly
in Sunni areas.
A US military official,
who agreed with this assessment, told Newsweek: The Sunni population
is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From
their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.
As the occupation
authorities see it, those who choose to collaborate with them are paying
a very heavy and visible price in the form of assassination of political
leaders, bombings of police stations and wholesale killing of militiamen.
The purpose of the plan is to exact a similar price from those who oppose
the occupation.
This would be the
key objective of the so-called Salvador option. As those who sympathize
and support the resistance are far less easily identified than Iraqis
who join the US puppet regime and its security forces, however, such
terror could only be carried out in the form of collective punishment
upon entire populations.
Rules of engagement
under the Salvador option would amount to massacring civilians in villages
and neighborhoods where US troops and their Iraqi collaborators come
under fire, on the theory that such atrocities would dissuade civilians
from harboring resistance fighters. Torture, already widely used in
Iraq, would become a systematic means not merely of gathering information,
but of terrorizing those who are tortured as well as those who learn
of their fate.
The bloody counterinsurgency
campaign waged by Washington and the dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala
and Honduras in the 1970s and 1980s was founded on such methods. It
is still considered a success story by those who occupy top positions
within the Bush administration.
Not a few of them
played a direct role in these bloody events. Washingtons current
ambassador to Iraqwho has run the Iraqi puppet regime while remaining
well hidden from the public eyeis John Negroponte. From 1981 to
1985, Negroponte was Washingtons envoy to Honduras. This was a
period in which Honduras served as a staging area for US military operations
throughout the region, including both the CIA-organized contra
war against Nicaragua and the repressive operations in El Salvador.
Death squads carried out a wave of kidnappings and executions in Honduras
itself, even as Washington increased military aid to the regime there
by 400 percent.
Similarly, the Bush
administration brought back Elliott Abrams, who as the Reagan administrations
assistant secretary for Inter-American affairs served as the principal
public defender of Central Americas right-wing dictatorships,
and was convicted in 1991 of withholding information from Congress in
relation to the Iran-contra affair. He is now the senior adviser on
the Middle East for the Bush White House.
Washington managed
to quell the popular uprisings in Central America only through massive
bloodshed. In El Salvador, at the height of the repression in the early
1980s, military and police death squads were killing over 13,000 people
a year.
Entire layers of
the population were subjected to systematic exterminationprincipally
militant workers, students and peasants together with their families
and friends. Given the countrys populationless than 5 millionthe
death toll was analogous to more than three-quarters of a million political
murders annually in a country the size of the United States.
Throughout this
period, the Reagan administration increased military aid to the Salvadoran
regime, while submitting reports to Congress insisting that the regime
was making a concerted and significant effort to improve
human rights conditions.
Those who headed
the death squadsmen like Roberto DAubuisson, known as Major
Blowtorch because of his personal participation in torturewere
paid assets of the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Socorro Juridico,
the legal aid society of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador, issued
a report in June 1980, describing a 50-day period in which it had recorded
the torture, assassination or massacre of more than 2,000 people at
the hands of the death squads:
In qualitative
terms, the reign of terror would appear to be the most distinctive characteristic
of this period. The cruelty of tortures practiced against the victims
of the repression had no precedent in the previous stages. The corpses
appeared scalped, beheaded, with throats cut or dismembered. The heads
of the decapitated began to appear hung from trees or impaled on fences.
In addition to the paramilitary-based repression, large-scale military
operations were mounted in the north and central-east regions of the
country. Massacres included women and children fleeing.... In the towns,
members of the teaching profession and students, health employees and
the church were victims of repression without mercy at the hands of
the armed forces.
Amnesty International
issued a report in 1982 describing the continued repressive violence
throughout the country:
The security
forces in El Salvador have been carrying out a systematic and widespread
program of torture, disappearances and individual and mass
killings of men, women and children. The victims have included not only
people suspected of opposition to the authorities, but thousands who
were simply in areas targeted for security operations, whose death or
mutilation seems to have been completely arbitrary.
In neighboring Guatemala
the level of killing was even more horrific. A UN-sponsored commission
concluded that a succession of US-backed military dictatorships murdered
some 200,000 people in the country. Under General Efrain Rios Montt,
who enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the Reagan administration, the
bloodbath unleashed against the Mayan Indian population of the central
highlands reached the level of genocide, according to the
report.
This is the reality
of the Salvador option under consideration at the Pentagon. There are,
however, significant differences between the US intervention in Central
America and the occupation of Iraq. In Guatemala and El Salvador, US
imperialism was able to work through entrenched native oligarchies and
armies that had been trained by the Pentagon and which had decades of
experience in suppressing the masses.
In Iraq, Washington
confronts a situation in which newly established security forces melt
away whenever confronted with serious resistance from Iraqi forces
opposed to the occupation.
According to the
Newsweek article, the plans being considered call for the use of US
Special Forces, both directly and as advisers to such elements
as the Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militiamen in forming the death
squads.
To the extent that
Washington is successful in recruiting such indigenous forces to carry
out its dirty work, the effect will be to unleash a full-scale civil
war between Iraqs divergent ethno-religious populations.
In all likelihood,
however, the bulk of the killing will be left to US troops. The Newsweek
report states that under contemplation are Green Beret-led cross-border
raids into Syria aimed at assassinating or snatching Iraqi
exiles opposed to the US occupation. The magazine states that those
abducted would be sent to secret facilities for interrogation,
meaning that the methods of torture exposed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere
will spread.
The thinking underlying
the proposal for a Salvador option is that the effective
utilization of assassination and terror by the Iraqi resistance against
those collaborating with the US occupation can only be countered by
even greater terror by Washington and its stooges against those who
oppose it.
This opposition,
however, encompasses broad masses of the Iraqi population. To crush
this opposition through the use of Salvadoran methods means a level
of killing that goes far beyond the slaughter that has already been
inflicted upon the Iraqi people.
Thus, the Bush administrations
pursuit of the so-called war on terrorism in Iraq now threatens to plunge
the US military into unprecedented acts of mass terror.