Letters to the Editor
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Let's get real here...
Anyone remember the Phoenix program in Indochina? Quarter of a million dead Vietnamese? Purges of civilians? Use of ethnic groups to nail other ethnic groups? CIA atrocity?
How about this? Remember the dirty wars in Central America? Death Squads in El Salvador killing 90,000? Death Squads in Guatemala killing 250,000? Death Squads in Honduras killing 40,000? The Contra Army accounting for 100,000? Remember the tactics used? Soldiers and police doing their jobs by day, donning hoods and going death squad at night? Remember the careful ways in which people were tortured? Corpses mutilated? Remember the guy who presided over all that? John Negroponte, who wound up as 'ambassador' to Iraq just a little while ago... And guys like Poindexter, North, Rumsfeld, etc., from the Reagan administration that wound up in the Bush administration. Remember how the CIA was in it all up to its eyeballs? How there was this big row about covert funding, a spat that wound up with figures like Eugene Hasenfuss and Oliver North? The thing that turned up as Iran/Contra?
Does anyone remember all this talk about the "El Salvador Option"? The counter-insurgency strategy that basically proposed to set Shiite death squads loose on the Sunni population in order to terrorize them into submission? And perhaps use Sunni irregulars to purge troublesome elements of the Shiites?
Does anyone recall who all this talk about the "El Salvador Option" just all of a sudden stopped, simultaneously, everywhere? As if all of a sudden the word came down officially to stop talking about it.
And how, spontaneously, a bare month or two after the Sunni/Shiite killings started up?
Remember how two British special forces guys were caught at a random checkpoint by Iraqi police.... disguised in native clothing and wigs, in a civilian car packed to the gills with weapons, ammunition and explosives... and how they killed a police officer? Remember how whatever it was they were involved in was so volatile that the British actually conducted an armed raid on a jail in a city they controlled to spring the bastards? They destroyed a building, released a bunch of criminals, were prepared to kill god knows how many people to keep what secret?
Has anyone noted how similar the current Shiite death squads modes of operation and tactics are to those used by El Salvador and Guatemalan death squads? How the MO's of torture and mutilation of corpses are almost exactly the same?
Isn't it funny how the Iraqi's managed to drift along under occupation for a couple of years without killing each other, until suddenly, all of this stuff, basically out of the blue boils over? Remember how Zaquari in previous years would try provocative bombings, but it never roused things up?
Look, people, wake up. The Iraqi civil war is an American invention. It's the El Salvador Option. It's a black ops, and its not a terribly subtle one. They've done everything but write their names in the sand with their dicks. In the end, these atrocities must be laid at America's door.
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Horror
This is tragic beyond measure.
Really, genuinely? I'm quite certain that if Iraqis were polled over which they'd prefer, sectarian atrocities commited daily in a near-anarchy situation or having had Saddam remain in power, they'd choose the latter.
Typing safely at hom, I can't blame them. I think those who are honest among us wouldn't be able to either.
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Valdron, You're plain old wrong...
Sunis and Shites have been at war for hundreds of years - remember that Iran/Iraq war? I understand why some people MUST blame the US for everything - and if we weren't in Iraq, I'm sure you'd create a reason why this is our fualt as well. I've never supported this war, but people like you give the neocons an easy way out: look at the lefty nut jobs in action - the American haters on Parade...
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Fake ID's and Survival
One of the major news web sites had a story yesterday about a young Iraqi, a Sunni, who managed to avoid getting killed by Shias manning a checkpoint by showing a fake ID card identifying him as a Shia.
So, this is the insanity we've brought to Iraq - folks having to carry two ID cards around so they can have a chance of not getting killed by death squads from either sect. Does anyone feel ashamed about this chaos that we've wrought by invading this country with a half-assed plan for reconstruction and peacekeeping? I, for one, do. This is how a supposedly moral, righteous nation acts? No, life under Saddam wasn't great, but this is supposed to be an improvement? And, of course, no one could have foreseen this level of sectarian violence before the invasion; it was totally unpredictable, right? I'm disheartened and ashamed, frankly, of the conduct of our leaders. The repercussions from this little desert misadventure are going to be bigger than we can imagine.
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No options
Valdron's conspiracy theories are a bit far fetched but they do hint at an awful truth which is that the US has run out of options. Maybe there are still a few people who live in Bush's fantasy world of how when the Iraqi take over security then the Americans can step down and come home, but surely those closer to the scene must see the futilty of it all. Notice how no one is even talking about reconstruction anymore.
This fall Bush will have to announce at least a plan for troop withdrawal and by the end of 2007 some sort of "victory" will have to be seen to happening. The US will be desperate to try anything that might work which will give the conspiracy theorists a field day at intepreting events.
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Conspiracy theory?
Well, I suppose we'll have to wait for intelligence documents to be declassified to know for sure.
But given the following:
1) The US has no other options, and has apparently no other overt strategy.
2) This sort of shit was pulled by the US before, in Reagan's Dirty Wars.
3) Prior to the Dirty Wars, this sort of tactic was employed by the US in a counterinsurgency campaign.
4) The Dirty Wars of central America were seen as a victory.
5) Many of the same people involved in those Dirty Wars are now in place in the Bush administration.
6) THEY ACTUALLY TALKED ABOUT DOING EXACTLY THIS AS THE "EL SALVADOR OPTION."
7) The emergence of serious Shiite/Sunni violence comes relatively late, almost three years into the occupation.
I'm thinking that the notion that the US actually deployed the El Salvador option is less a conspiracy theory and more along the lines of a reasonable inference with a near certain degree of probability. Certainly the public discussions of the "El Salvador Option" only months before this civil war starts up strikes me as tantamount to a confession.
The alternative is that one would have to believe that a situation came about spontaneously after three years, that the strategists had been talking about implementing. Either these guys are astoundingly lucky, or they simply implemented their strategy.
What are the real objections?
That the Bush administration wouldn't do anything dishonest and nasty like that? This is an administration that knowingly used false information to get America into a war with Iraq, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, that publicly considered using nuclear weapons against Iran, that established Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and sanctioned torture there and in a 'rendition' program, that undertakes massive spying on the American people. I don't think that there's much percentage in betting on the moral caliber of the United States Government, or for that matter given recent events, on the moral caliber of the forces in the United States occupation.