[lbo-talk] Organizing Death Squads -- from El Salvador to Iraq(A new turn in US military strategy in Iraq?)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri May 27 20:57:49 PDT 2005


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> [clip]
> The best report on Washington's endeavor to create death squads in
> Iraq is Peter Maass's "The Way of the Commandos" [clip]
>
> <blockquote> [clip]
>
> The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often
> been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed
> by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war
> beginning in 1980. The cost was high -- more than 70,000 people were
> killed,

Chat among the El Salvador elite at that time (paraphrased from memory): In the 1930s we had to kill 50,000 peasants to crush the rebellion; how many will we have to kill this time. That was in a nation of 4.6 million when the war began.

It seriously puzzles me that any journalist or leftist who knows (or certainly should know) this history could be so incredibly naive as not to take it for granted that the occupation of Iraq would become increasingly brutal and destructive. And of course most leftists did recognize even in 1990 that an occupation of Iraq would have these results. I can understand and accept that people new to anti-war activity would see Iraq as a special case and only gradually come to see that it repeated a pattern as old as the pacification of the Philippines, but that that such a debate should be necessary within the left passes understanding.

To have to debate the proper attitude of leftists towards the Iraq occupation is as bizarre as to have to debate that Wal-Mart treats women badly.

Carrol



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