Views » January 17, 2005

Bush’s Death Squads

By Robert Parry

Refusing to admit personal misjudgments on Iraq, George W. Bush instead is pushing the United States toward becoming what might be called a permanent “counter-terrorist” state, which uses torture, cross-border death squads, and even collective punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world.

Since securing a second term, Bush has pressed ahead with this hard-line strategy, in part by removing dissidents inside his administration while retaining or promoting his protégés.

As a centerpiece of this tougher strategy to pacify Iraq, Bush is contemplating the adoption of the brutal practices that were used to suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the ’80s. The Pentagon is “intensively debating” a new policy for Iraq called the “Salvador option,” Newsweek magazine reported on January 9.

The strategy is named after the Reagan-Bush administration’s “still-secret strategy” of supporting El Salvador’s right-wing security forces, which operated clandestine “death squads” to eliminate both leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers, Newsweek reported. “Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.

The magazine also noted that a number of Bush administration officials were leading figures in the Central American operations of the ’80s, such as John Negroponte, who was then U.S. ambassador to Honduras and is now U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Other current officials who played key roles in Central America include Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Central American policies at the State Department and who is now a Middle East adviser on Bush’s National Security Council staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a powerful defender of the Central American policies while a member of the House of Representatives.

The insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala were crushed through the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter carried out by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children in and around the town of El Mozote in 1981.

The Reagan-Bush strategy also had a domestic component, the so-called “perception management” operation. Administration propaganda justified U.S. actions in Central America by portraying the popular uprisings as an attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a beachhead in the Americas to threaten the U.S. southern border.

By employing the “Salvador option” in Iraq, the U.S. military would crank up the pain, especially in Sunni Muslim areas where resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been strongest. In effect, Bush would assign other Iraqi ethnic groups the job of leading the “death squad” campaign against the Sunnis.

“One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with discussions,” Newsweek reported.

Newsweek quoted one military source as saying, “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.”

The conditions in Central America and Iraq are not parallel, however.

In Central America, powerful oligarchies had long surrounded themselves with ruthless security forces and armies. So, when uprisings swept across the region in the early ’80s, the Reagan-Bush administration had ready-made—though unsavory—allies who could do the dirty work with help from Washington.

A different dynamic exists in Iraq, because the Bush administration chose to disband rather than co-opt the Iraqi army. That left U.S. forces with few reliable local allies and put the onus for carrying out counterinsurgency operations on American soldiers who were unfamiliar with the land, the culture and the language.

Those problems, in turn, contributed to a series of counterproductive tactics, including the heavy-handed roundups of Iraqi suspects, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the killing of innocent civilians by jittery U.S. troops fearful of suicide bombings. The blame for these medieval tactics continues to climb the chain of command toward the Oval Office.

Bush finds himself facing a narrowing list of very tough choices. He could acknowledge his mistakes and seek international help in extricating U.S. forces from Iraq. But he abhors admitting errors, even small ones.

Instead Bush appears to be upping the ante, expanding the war by having Iraqi Kurds and Shiites kill Sunnis. This is a prescription for civil war or genocide.

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• Reader Comments

  I think I’m going to vomit....

  remind me again how fostering civil war is going to “stabilize the region”?

  Posted by the greatwent on Jan 17, 2005 at 11:29 AM

  remember kids, they want us to believe it’s all hopeless.  that any form of uprising is moot.  there’s a difference between dying as a suburban coward, and dying as a true believer in human rights.

  actually, there’s not.  both will prolly hurt as much as monkeys raping granite.  but, you know what i mean.

  we’re all caught up in a punchline.  God in his omnipotent glory has allowed 6 billion zingers to walk around.  and that’s just on one planet!  so let’s give him a good laugh and kill each other over human rights.

  the funniest thing to me, is how i’m totally serious.  i’m not a moronic Bush-supporter, neither am i a blind follower in the Democratic party.  Both are stained institutions.  But there’s more than this.  There’s just got to be.  And there are many ways to let lessons be learned.  Sometimes these ways can be achieved through reading other people’s words and assimilating them as one’s own in a desperate attempt of self-justification.  Other times they come through reaching level 60 on World of Warcraft.  SOmetimes people believe greatness occurs when they remember a childhood sled.  Other times when they carry the guilt for someone being killed for his/her beliefs.  And sometimes, though rarely in our present nation, meaning comes through the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Now please, flame on

  Posted by surge on Jan 17, 2005 at 5:30 PM

  I swear, every time I tell a friend that we’re headed the way of Germany in the 30,s and they chuckle nervously, another news item pops up to help me out. The article neglects to mention that among the innocents killed by the US trained and financed death squads were a Catholic archbishop, shot in church, as well as two American nuns and two layworkers. The thousands of people killed and dissappeared in Chile and Argentina for crimes as innocuous as belonging to a trade union or singing a protest song are also deaths that US taxpayers unknowingly supported because our government helped install the regimes that carried out these crimes against humanity. And now, news that our very own “Caligula”, George W. Bush, has probably already ordered the assassination teams into action and the white house lawyers to work on the memeos that will excuse government officials from responsability.
  Typically, the moral values crowd nods approvingly. We have gone seriously astray as a nation, please, someone stop us before we destroy ourselves and take the rest of the planet with us. It’s “strangelovian”, it would make a damn funny black comedy if it weren’t all too tragically true. If we, the citizens of this country, allow this to take place in our name, so we can carry on our spoiled, selfish way of life we deserve the consequences that will surely come from it.

  Posted by Kenneth D. Brown on Jan 17, 2005 at 11:44 PM

  Surge, what the hell are you going on about?

  Posted by Huh on Jan 18, 2005 at 3:00 AM

  George W. Bush is a murderer.  I will repeat that, George W. Bush is a murderer.  George W. Bush is as guilty as Charles Manson.  Think carefully about it.  I’m not just ranting.  There are people who are dead who would be alive now if Bush had not got into power.  Innocent women and children, not to mention thousands of men who were just defending their country like we would if our country were invaded.  Jesus Christ, this country has become an insane asylum.

  Posted by Impeach Bush on Jan 18, 2005 at 3:49 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 27 posts.

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