perhaps with John Negroponte's El Salvador option that the Pentagon is now discussing as an option if the "surge" fails, as it seems to be doing.
Published on Thursday, March 15, 2007 by the New York Times
If Elected... Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain
by Michael R. Gordon and Patrick Healy WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.
In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.
In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”
She said in the interview that there were “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.
The United States’ security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,” she said.
“It is right in the heart of the oil region,” she said. “It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.” http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0315-02.htmPublished on Friday, March 16, 2007 by The Progressive
Salvador Option Surfaces Again
by Elizabeth DiNovella During Bush’s “social justice” tour of Latin America, he didn’t stop in El Salvador, a nation sorely needing some social justice. His military planners, though, had the small Central American country on their minds.
The same day Bush talked about the U.S. being “generous and compassionate” on his Latin American tour, Pentagon officials and military consultants discussed a fallback strategy for Iraq based on counterinsurgency tactics used in El Salvador.
The U.S. government spent millions of dollars to support the Salvadoran military throughout the 1980s as part of its Cold War strategy of propping up anti-Communist forces. Reagan also sent fifty-five Green Berets to train Salvadoran troops, led for several years by James Steele.
<snip>
And James Steele is back prosecuting another counterinsurgency conflict, this time in Iraq.
But the similarities between U.S. military involvement in Iraq and El Salvador don’t end there. In order to circumvent Congressionally mandated limits on the number of U.S. military personnel on the ground, the Pentagon outsourced the work to private contractors. Some of the same private military contractors, such as DynCorp, now hold contracts for security work in Iraq.
The use of paramilitaries and mercenaries led to the deaths of thousands of people in El Salvador. This is not a decent option for the people of Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0316-29.htmPublished on Thursday, March 15, 2007 by the New Statesman/UK
The Liberal War on Democracy
by John Pilger When you see who is controlling the means of production here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and periodicals, and the TV stations, from which most Americans take their news, and when you see how the so-called war on terror is being conducted, you begin to understand where we are headed. It's quite something that the nuclear threat today should be seen first and foremost as coming from the United States of America and Great Britain."
McGovern was the author of the president's daily CIA intelligence brief. I interviewed him more than three years ago, and his prescient words are as striking today as Cockburn's revelation of Rumsfeld's secret life is illumin ating. His description of fascism within a nominally free society recalls George Orwell's warning that totalitarianism does not require a totalitarian state.
The lies that have caused this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by the majority of humanity. This was illustrated vividly on 15-16 February 2003 when some 30 million people took to the streets of cities around the world, including the greatest demonstration in British history. It was illustrated again the other day in Latin America, which George W Bush on tour sought to reclaim for America's lost "backyard".
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0315-29.htm 
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