Empire Notes

As we roll closer to the planned demonstration elections in Iraq – elections that will now be happening while an official state of emergency is in effect – there’s a new article in Newsweek that details more of the vision of democracy that the United States has in Iraq.

There is intense debate in the Pentagon over what’s being called the “Salvador option.” The murderous counterinsurgency in El Salvador in the 1980’s, where, as Dick Cheney said in the vice presidential debate, 75,000 people were killed by terrorists (he just neglected to mention that it was U.S.-backed terrorists) is rightly seen as a success. The counterinsurgency in Iraq is quite obviously being seen as a failure – this despite the fact that the insurgency is not exactly a success.

So, naturally, the thing to do is to jettison a failing strategy and adopt a tried-and-true approach. The key to success in El Salvador was the death squads. These were groups with no formal affiliation with the government, although they drew personnel, training, resources, and legal cover from the government. They were Salvadoreans, familiar with their own country and good at deciding who to target for maximum political effect. Most of all, they operated with complete impunity, with no need to consider legal restrictions on their operations.

The option currently under discussion would involve using a handful of Special Forces to create and train small groups of indigenous forces, mostly either Kurdish peshmerga or Shi’a militiamen from one of the political parties that supports the occupation.

This is often being discussed as if it simply involves creating groups that have a greater capacity to strike surgically, to find out who really is part of the resistance before they attack – obviously, the aerial attacks like those on so-called “Zarqawi safehouses” in Fallujah before the November assault seemed to kill primarily civilians. And should these plans come up for a wider discussion in the media here, this is the argument that will no doubt be stressed. Expect pundits to say, should it prove necessary, that in fact such squads are far more humane and efficient than large-scale military operations or aerial bombing.

The truth of the matter is that, just as torture isn’t really primarily about extracting information, death squads aren’t primarily about killing particular people who are judged to be a threat. The true rationale for both is to create a climate of pervasive fear.

The same article quotes Major General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, on the true logic of the idea:

The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in.

Then it quotes an anonymous source in the Pentagon suggesting that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency: "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

On one level, this is simply making more explicit the strategy that was already carried out with some level of success in Fallujah. The population has been taught a severe lesson in the costs, not of supporting the resistance, but of not actively opposing the resistance and helping the occupying forces. Imposing such costs is a clear violation of the laws of war, which prohibit any attempts to make civilians in an occupied country fulfill a military role, but we all know what Bush and Gonzales think of the laws of war.

On another level, this represents yet another moral barrier to be crossed, not merely as a predictable consequence of running an occupation, but deliberately and unapologetically. Not only are people in the Pentagon openly discussing U.S.-administered state terror, the main argument is over whether these death squads will be under the supervision and authority of the CIA or of Defense.

Mark Danner, in response to Alberto Gonzales’ impending confirmation, wrote an op-ed in the Times entitled “We are all torturers now.” This plan, being seriously considered, would make us all assassins and terrorists.