Bloodless Coup

Forget Nixon, Fast Forward to Reagan

I know that many people are obsessed with Fitzmas and who knew what when and how could Karl Rove and Scooter and Novak and whether Woodward has come full circle from outsider to insider with matching bookend presidential scandals and how Iraq and why and whether or not it compares to Viet Nam and don't we remember that Cheney and Rumsfeld worked for Nixon too, huh? Huh? HUH?!

I keep getting this queasy feeling though. And it's more of a Reagan queasy. A Central America kind of queasy.

Two short days ago I was being snide about Negroponte's service in Central America under the Reagan administration. Laura Rozen isn't being snide. She has two posts up today that make me wish I hadn't been so flippant.

In one post, Rozen links to a Newsweek piece about internal Pentagon discussions about using a "Salvador" option in Iraq. You remember El Salvador, right? Where the U.S. backed regime killed the nuns, in addition to persecuting leftists and inflicting terrible consequences on the civilian population? The El Mozote massacre? Yeah, that El Salvador.

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.

snip

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.

So let's just acknowledge all the "allegeds" up front. Even with the most skeptical eye towards U.S. involvement with human rights abuses, El Salvador is not the "option" on which to model an insurgent strategy. The historical record shows that at minimum our concerns about communist insugents led us to look the other way while still supplying billions of dollars to support a violent and corrupt regime responsible for terrible abuses (see below the fold for more information about El Salvador, and some generalized snark on US foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s).

Following that model, 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 the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

In the Salvadoran model, the U.S trained forces were linked repeatedly to human rights violations:"Nineteen of the 27 Salvadoran officers who took part in the massacre by a UN Truth Commission report were graduates of the SOA. In fact, almost three-quarters of the Salvadoran officers implicated in seven other bloodbaths during El Salvador's civil war[...] were trained by the SOA." As the articles Rozen references point out, Iraq might be starting to look like a model copy of the successful quelling of the insurgency. Except that the insurgency hasn't been quelled in Iraq, and the price of success in El Salvador was 75,000 lives. As Rozen says:

So the US is no hapless bystander to the Shiite death squads we are seeing, but they are the product of deliberate Pentagon policy? Is Cambone going to be hauled before Congress or what? Talk about missing the black helicopter crowd. One cannot but long for justice for these guys. Could some forward looking European nation please arrest them next time they stop over, just to give them a scare? A little Pinochet-like unpleasant episode, if not a full fledged trial? Doesn't this country deserve to know what is being done in our name? If these guys believe in what they're doing, if they believe it's in the interest of US national security, why don't they have the courage to admit it openly? Why are they trying to organize Shiite death squads in secret? Because it would be bad for the US to be seen to be behind this policy? Or because they are concerned about their own legal vulnerability?

The role of religious organizations in calling for an end to human rights abuses in the Americas has been widely recognized, and El Salvador gives us one of the most famous cases: Archbishop Oscar Romero. The Catholic Church, especially, had the moral authority and relative immunity from backlash that allowed it to criticize the death squads and other human rights abuses. Because of the religious nature of the emerging conflict in Iraq, it is doubtful that there is a domestic social or cultural institution to play such a role. And Romero? It took almost twenty five years to bring Romero's assassins to justice.

What's coming next? Mothers standing silent? Waiting for their children to come home? From the NYT:

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison. In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

And Rozen's criticism about the unwillingness of the US government to either own up to collaborating, or stand up to condemn the behavior echoes the U.S. involvment in El Salvador, where the Reagan administration made lukewarm efforts to pressure the goverment to stop human rights abuses, and the Salvadoran regime engaged in "palliative" fixes. (my emphasis in the following)

American officials, who are overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police, acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge.

But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible. The American officials insisted on anonymity because they were working closely with the Iraqi government and did not want to criticize it publicly.

And if you don't like the NYT, try the Knight Ridder piece:

A senior American military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said he suspected that the abuse wasn't isolated to the jail the U.S. military discovered.

There is no guarantee that the squads that perpetrate these abductions are affiliated with the Iraqi authorities just because they have uniforms and identify themselves as being part of the Interior Ministry. It's quite possible, given the degree of lawlessness, that the uniforms are stolen, pirated, or subverted. Waving hands in the air and letting it go on is not going to help convince the populace the a) the government isn't involved and b) that the U.S. really cares about stopping human rights violations, already a huge problem due to the image left from Abu Ghraib (just for starters). Even if the individuals interviewed for these pieces cannot comment for safety reasons, the U.S. has to be highly visible in its condemnation and its actions against such abuse.

In five visits to a women's prison in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district over more than three months, the Human Rights Ministry found that women were being raped by male guards, Ussayran said. That problem continues.

One woman told the Human Rights Ministry that she was raped seven times on the seventh floor of the Interior Ministry, which is notorious to some Iraqi Sunni Muslims and home to intelligence offices. The Human Rights Ministry investigated that, and Ussayran said the problem had been rectified.

snip

In July 2004, a Knight Ridder reporter witnessed prisoners being beaten at the Interior Ministry.

"Don't talk to me about human rights," said one interrogator who punched several prisoners in front of a reporter. He asked not to be named because he frequently worked undercover. "When security settles down, we'll talk about human rights. Right now, I need confessions."

When is that going to be? Those beatings aren't helping, either through the poor quality of intelligence obtained from abuse, or the backlash from engaging in it. And even if it isn't a problem of our direct making, it's a problem that needs to be forcibly dealt with by the U.S., not ignored or tacitly condoned as part of a "Salvadoran" strategy.

Random Extra Comments That Didn't Quite Fit

1) Now, Negoponte argues that linking his name to El Salvador is "utterly gratuitous." Clearly, he was not the Ambassador to El Salvador, and quite obviously, the Reagan administration's foreign policy in El Salvador was vastly different and far away from what was going on in Honduras and had absolutely nothing to do with anything that was happening in Ic-Nay Aragua-ay. No, no reason at all to think that El Salvador was even remotely close to Honduras, the launching pad for U.S. support of the Contras in Nicaragua.

2) In the 1990s, under the Clinton (yes, I'm sure it's all his fault somehow) administration, a large number of documents relating to the US role in El Salvador were declassified. Here is a summary essay about the period covered by the documents in the National Security Archive.

Posted by binky at November 29, 2005 04:50 PM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs | Latin America | Politics