by Max Fuller
www.globalresearch.ca 2 june 2005
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html Abstract
The following article examines evidence that the 'Salvador Option' for Iraq has been ongoing for some time and attempts to say what such an option will mean. It pays particular attention to the role of the Special Police Commandos, considering both the background of their US liaisons and their deployment in Iraq. The article also looks at the evidence for death-squad style massacres in Iraq and draws attention to the almost complete absence of investigation. As such, the article represents an initial effort to compile and examine some of these mass killings and is intended to spur others into further looking at the evidence. Finally, the article turns away from the notion that sectarianism is a sufficient explanation for the violence in Iraq, locating it structurally at the hands of the state as part of the ongoing economic subjugation of Iraq.Mounting evidence indicates that the ‘Salvador Option’ mooted for Iraq is already proceeding at full throttle On 8 January this year, Newsweek published an article that claimed the US government was considering a ‘Salvador Option’ to combat the insurgency in Iraq (
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/ ). The Salvador Option is a reference to the military assistance programme of the 1980s, initiated under Jimmy Carter and subsequently pursued by the Reagan administration, in which the US trained and materially supported the Salvadoran military in its counter-insurgency campaign against popularly supported FMLN guerrillas. The Newsweek article was widely cited in the mainstream media but the allegations were rapidly dismissed by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. Though the reports mentioned human-rights violations, they generally made little of the fact that it was the very units that US military advisors had instructed that were frequently responsible for the most unspeakable crimes* and that there was at times a clear correlation between fresh bouts of training and subsequent atrocities (see Noam Chomsky, ‘The Crucifixion of El Salvador’,
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-2-02.html ).
In an earlier interview on 10 January, retired General Wayne Downing, former head of all US special operations forces, took a very different line, stating that US-backed special units had been ‘conducting strikes’ against leaders of the so-called insurgency since March 2003 (cited in ‘Phoenix Rising in Iraq’ by Stephen Shalom,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7227 ). However, Downing was careful to say that implementing a Salvadoran strategy would add an extra ‘type’ of unit to the occupation’s arsenal. What neither the press, Donald Rumsfeld, nor General Downing pointed out was that the Salvador Option was already well underway in Iraq, and far more literally than might have been imagined.
According to an article recently published in New York Times Magazine, in September 2004 Counsellor to the US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces James Steele was assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, formed under the operational control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry (‘The Way of the Commandos’, Peter Maass,
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/TheWay_of_the_Commandos.html ).
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html
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