[lit-ideas] The Salvador Option in Iraq

From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 6 May 2006 06:30:33 -0700 (PDT)
The party line changed the other day. For almost three
years it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force
behind the "insurgency", led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was clearly being groomed
for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein enjoys. It
mattered not that al-Zarqawi had never been seen alive
and that only a fraction of the "insurgents" followed
al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's role was to
distract attention from the thing that almost all
Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American occupation of
their country. 

Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian
violence" and "civil war", the big news is the attacks
by Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news,
which is not reported in the CNN "mainstream", is that
the Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq. This is
the campaign of terror by death squads armed and
trained by the US, which attack Sunnis and Shias
alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war
and the break-up of Iraq, the original war aim of
Bush's administration. The ministry of the interior in
Baghdad, which is run by the CIA, directs the
principal death squads. Their members are not
exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal
are the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, headed by
former senior officers in Saddam's Ba'ath Party. This
unit was formed and trained by CIA
"counter-insurgency" experts, including veterans of
the CIA's terror operations in central America in the
1980s, notably El Salvador. In his new book, Empire's
Workshop (Metropolitan Books), the American historian
Greg Grandin describes the Salvador Option thus: "Once
in office, [President] Reagan came down hard on
central America, in effect letting his
administration's most committed militarists set and
execute policy. In El Salvador, they provided more
than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal
counter-insurgency campaign . . . All told, US allies
in central America during Reagan's two terms killed
over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands
and drove millions into exile." 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12945.htm

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[lit-ideas] The Salvador Option in Iraq

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