In Case You Missed It

[sasha031]

The Salvador Option’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. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

it ties in everything that is happening now.

[Dhalgren]

1. The time line is about right, too.

The article was published on Jan. 14th, 2005 and now we are seeing the fruits of the US Salvador Option. The US must be stopped by someone, some time, or it will enslave or murder the whole planet. We have become monsters and we must be stopped...

[EFerrari]

2. It sure does.

Same crew.

[hootinholler]

3. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents."

Hmmm, let's see, Offensives against the insurgents didn't work in Chechnia, Vietnam, Somalia, El Salvador, Missouri during the civil war, or during the revolution.

Why do they think it will work today?

-Hoot