Hey, I Got An Idea, Let’s Train Assassins….

You know, it’ll work, kind of like everyone in Iraq just laying down and following an Iranian Spy on the American payroll did.

Who wants to bet if these idiots try this, we’ll end up fighting them later? The Middle East is far from Central America and there are resources beyond belief that simply didn’t exist for the Salvadoran rebels. While the idea of Soviet help (and there was some marginal help) played big in the American mind, the leftists in El Salvador had few resources compared to what the insurgents in Iraq have in an oil rich area.

More than that, the notion that the Salvador option is acceptable in any way is only possible because of the broad ignorance over what happened in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. It wasn’t just Communists and FMLN activists who were killed, it was Christian Democratic Party members who were centrists and anti-communist. They just thought they should beat the leftists and communists at the ballot box and not kill them all.

From the Truth Commission findings

The United States Embassy reported a total of 5,639 people killed, of whom 2,330 were civilians, 762 were members of the armed forces and 2,547 were members of the guerrilla forces. Christian Legal Aid reported that during the first eight months of 1982, there were a total of 3,059 political murders, “nearly all of them the result of action by Government agents against civilians not involved in military combat”. 49 The same source reported that the total number of civilian deaths in 1982 was 5,962. 50

The death squads >51 continued to operate with impunity in 1982. On 10 March, the Alianza Anticomunista de El Salvador published a list of 34 people who had been condemned to death for “discrediting the armed forces”. Most of them were journalists. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, referring to the discovery of clandestine graves of death squad victims, reported that on 24 May the bodies of more than 150 people had been dumped at Puerta del Diablo, Panchimalco. 52 On 27 May, the bodies of six members of the Christian Democratic Party were found at El Play?n, another clandestine mass grave used by the death squads. 53 President Duarte publicly denounced the extreme right wing, holding it responsible for the murder of hundreds of PDC members and mayors. Four Dutch journalists were killed on 17 March 1982 (see the case in chap. IV

Nearly 6000 civilian deaths in a country that had less than 6 million people. Think about the impact of 9-11 in this country of over 250 million with a loss of half of that. In one year.

I don’t think anyone expects a situation like this to be an easy problem to solve or that there won’t be someone who crosses the line from time to time and that may benefit the larger cause, but you can’t create a stable democracy while destroying the rule of law. For all those screaming about moral clarity, it’s about time to stand up and point out this administration is careening out of control on the moral highway.

Worse, Christopher Dickey points out the administration is learning the wrong lessons from El Salvador.

I’ll go one step farther and point out that Jose Duarte’s Presidency provided a wedge between the FMLN and the citizenry by offering peace talks on reasonable terms, thus isolating the FMLN in public opinion. It’s hard to see how the death squads worked as much as a political alternative that reduced potential support for the FMLN.