Death-Squad Democracy

Jan. 8 - 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. (...) 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.

By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 5:24 p.m. ET Jan. 11, 2005

Among the many tools used to build and defend pro-American democracies, murder is among the trickiest. But murder—yes, let’s insist on that word—is also quite common in the annals of nation-building, at least in my experience, and sometimes it’s been very effective. Now we hear that some of the Bush administration’s strategists are talking about what they call “ The Salvador Option ”, which seems to imply “death squads” (as the murderers were called in El Salvador and Guatemala) or “hit teams” (as they’ve been called in Israel).

Death-Squad Democracy
Are there parallels between El Salvador in the ‘80s and Iraq today? Maybe. But the ‘lessons learned’ by Washington are the wrong ones
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey

To understand the background and to know more about "The Salvador Option", you may want to read about The Most Dangerous Person in Baghdad