Demagogue

Everyone is linking to this Newsweek article, so I will too

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.

When Bush took office, many wondered just what sort of impact the various "Iran-Contra" figures he brought on board would have on his administration.

Now we know.

Is this what we have to look forward to in Iraq?

President George W. Bush recruited many Reagan/Bush-era veterans of the Central American wars to serve on his foreign policy team. Despite objections from Democrats in Congress, Bush's déjá vu appointments have included Eliot Abrams (who pled guilty to two counts of lying to Congress during the Iran Contra hearings), Richard Armitage, John Poindexter, Roger Noriega and Otto Reich. Most recently, John Negroponte was appointed ambassador to Iraq. Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras under George H.W. Bush and was criticized by human rights organizations for not doing enough to stem death squad activity there.

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[Archbishop Oscar Romero] was originally considered a conservative Vatican appointment, but by 1980 he had become outraged by the spiraling violence directed against reformers, radicals and the poor. He used his immensely influential sermons to try to avert the coming civil war.

"The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters," Romero admonished the military in a sermon broadcast on radio just days before he was killed. "When you hear the voice of the man commanding you to kill, remember instead the voice of God. Thou shalt not kill."

Romero was assassinated in the middle of conducting a mass. At his funeral, in front of the cathedral where his body now lies, army snipers opened fire on a weeping crowd of 100,00, killing 40. Within weeks, all-out war was on. By the end of the decade, 75,000 were dead, 600,000 had been displaced inside the country, and more than a million had gone into exile.

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After peace accords were signed by the FMLN and the ARENA in 1992, the United Nations set up a truth commission to get to the bottom of war crimes in El Salvador. The commission found that 90 percent of the atrocities were committed by the government and government-sponsored death squads. The report did not shy away from FMLN crimes either, condemning the FMLN's practice of assassinating mayors loyal to the military.

The truth commission findings state unequivocally that "Former Major Roberto D'Aubuisson gave the order to assassinate the archbishop [Romero] and gave precise instructions to members of his security service, acting as a 'death squad,' to organize and supervise the assassination." Declassified U.S. documents corroborate this account.

D'Aubuisson was the founder of the National Republican Alliance (ARENA), the political party that has controlled El Salvador's presidency for the last 15 years.