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The Salvador option<br>
</font><font size=2><i>By</i></font><font size=3> Scott Ritter <br><br>
Thursday 20 January 2005, 15:51 Makka Time, 12:51 GMT
<br><br>
By any standard, the ongoing American occupation of Iraq is a
disaster. <br><br>
The highly vaunted US military machine, laurelled and praised for its
historic march on Baghdad in March and April of 2003, today finds itself
a broken force, on the defensive in a land that it may occupy in part,
but does not control. <br><br>
The all-out offensive to break the back of the resistance in Falluja has
failed, leaving a city destroyed by American firepower, and still very
much in the grips of the anti-American fighters. <br><br>
The same is true of Mosul, Samarra, or any other location where the US
military has undertaken “decisive” action against the fighters, only to
find that, within days, the fighting has returned, stronger than
ever. <br><br>
And yet, it now appears as if the United States, in an effort to take the
offensive against the fighters in Iraq, is prepared to compound its past
mistakes in Iraq by embarking on a new course of action derived from some
of the darkest, and most embarrassing moments of America's modern
history. <br><br>
According to press accounts, the Pentagon is considering the
organisation, training and equipping of so-called death squads, teams of
Iraqi assassins who would be used to infiltrate and eliminate the
leadership of the Iraqi resistance. <br><br>
Called the Salvador Option, in reference to similar US-backed death
squads that terrorised the population of El Salvador during the 1980s,
the proposed plan actually has as its roots the Phoenix assassination
programme undertaken during the Vietnam war, where American-led assassins
killed thousands of known or suspected Vietcong collaborators.
<br><br>
Perhaps it is a sign of the desperation felt inside the Pentagon, or an
underscoring of the ideological perversity of those in charge, that the
US military would draw upon the failed programmes of the past to resolve
an insoluble problem of today.
<br><br>
The Salvador Option would not be the first embrace of assassination as a
tool of occupation undertaken by the United States in Iraq.
<br><br>
In the months following Paul Bremer's taking over of the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) in June 2003, the streets of Baghdad crawled
with scores of assassination squads. <br><br>
Among the more effective and brutal of these units were those drawn from
the Badr Brigade, the armed militia of the Shia political party known as
the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.
<br><br>
Although not publicly acknowledged, the role played by the various
anti-Saddam militias in confronting the residual elements of Saddam's
former ruling Baath Party offered a glimpse into what was, and is, an
unspoken element of the US policy regarding de-Baathification - let the
Iraqis do the dirty work. <br><br>
SCIRI's efforts to exterminate Baath Party remnants still loyal to Saddam
Hussein, or who stand accused of committing crimes against SCIRI or its
sympathisers, attracted the attention of the “black” side of the CPA-run
de-Baathification efforts – covert operations run by the CIA and elite
Special Operations units of the United States military. <br><br>
Of all the various players in this deadly game, the Badr militia stood
out as the most willing and able to take the fight to the Baathist
holdouts. <br><br>
Tipped off by the CPA's covert operatives, the Badr assassination squads
killed dozens of Baathists in and around Baghdad.<br><br>
But the assassination of former Baathists did nothing to pacify
Iraq. <br><br>
The ongoing resistance to the American occupation of Iraq was not founded
in the formal structure of the Baath Party, but rather the complex
mixture of tribal and religious motivations which had, since 1995, been
blended into the secretive cell structure of the Baath Party.
<br><br>
While the Americans and their SCIRI allies focused on bringing to heel
former Baathists, the resistance morphed into a genuine grassroots
national liberation movement where strategic planning may very well be
the product of former Baathists, but the day-to-day tactical decisions
are more likely to be made by tribal shaikhs and local clerics.
<br><br>
The increasing success of the resistance was attributed in part to the
failure of the CPA-ordered de-Baathification policy. <br><br>
In an effort to reverse this trend, Bremer rescinded his
de-Baathification programme, and ordered the Badr assassination squads to
stand down. <br><br>
This change of policy direction could not change the reality on the
ground in Iraq, however. <br><br>
The Sunni-based resistance, having been targeted by the Badr assassins,
struck back with a vengeance. <br><br>
In a campaign of targeted assassinations using car bombs and ambushes,
the resistance has engaged in its own campaign of terror against the
Shia, viewed by the Sunni fighters as being little more than
collaborators of the American occupation. <br><br>
Having started the game of politically motivated assassination, the US
has once again found itself trumped by forces inside Iraq it does not
understand, and as such will never be able to defeat.<br><br>
The Salvador Option fails on a number of levels. First and foremost
is the moral and ethical one. <br><br>
While it is difficult at times to understand and comprehend, let alone
justify, the tactics used by the Iraqi resistance, history has shown that
the tools of remote ambush, instead of a direct assassination, have
always been used by freedom fighters when confronting an illegitimate
foreign occupier who possesses overwhelming conventional military
superiority. <br><br>
As such, history celebrates the resistance of the French and the Russians
when occupied by the Germans during the second world war, the Chinese
resistance to Japanese occupation during that same time, or even the
decades-long national liberation movement in Vietnam which defeated not
only the French and the Americans, but also the illegitimate government
these two occupiers attempted to impose on the people of South
Vietnam. <br><br>
History, on the other hand, treats harshly the occupying power which
resorts to the use of the tools of terror to subdue an occupied
people. <br><br>
Thus, while it is fine for a French resistance fighter to blow up a
German troop train, it is not acceptable for the Germans to burn a French
village in retaliation. <br><br>
History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi
resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and
their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government. <br><br>
And history will condemn the immorality of the American occupation, which
has debased the values and ideals of the American people by legitimising
torture, rape and murder as a means of furthering an illegal war of
aggression. <br><br>
Ethics aside, the Salvador Option will fail simply because it cannot
succeed. In an effort to confront a Sunni-based resistance, the Pentagon
proposes that special assassination squads be recruited from the ranks of
“loyal” Kurds and Shia. <br><br>
In the 30 years of Saddam's rule, the Baathist government and its
security organs were very successful in infiltrating the ranks of Kurdish
and Shia opposition movements. <br><br>
The Shia and Kurds, on the other hand, have no history of being able to
do the same to the Sunni. If anything has emerged as the undisputable
truth in post-invasion Iraq, it is that the Iraqi resistance knows Iraq
infinitely better than the American occupiers. <br><br>
If implemented, the Salvador Option will serve as the impetus for all-out
civil war. In the same manner that the CPA-backed assassination of
Baathists prompted the restructuring and strengthening of the Sunni-led
resistance, any effort by US-backed Kurdish and Shia assassination teams
to target Sunni resistance leaders will remove all impediments for a
general outbreak of ethnic and religious warfare in Iraq.<br><br>
It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military
operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and
wounding of many American service members, and many more
Iraqis.<br><br>
As an American, I have hoped that there was a way for America to emerge
victorious in Iraq, with our national security and honour intact, and
Iraq itself a better nation than the one we “liberated”. But it is far
too late for this to happen. <br><br>
We not only invaded Iraq on false pretences, but we perverted the notion
of liberation by removing Saddam and his cronies from his palaces,
replacing them with American occupiers who have not only kept open
Saddam's most notorious prisons, but also the practice of torture, rape
and abuse we were supposed to be bringing to an end. <br><br>
Faced with our inability to come to grips with a popular-based resistance
that has grown exponentially over the past year, the best the American
policy planners can come up with is to embrace our own form of terrorism,
supporting death squads we cannot control and which will only further
debase the moral foundation of our nation while slaughtering even more
Iraqis. <br><br>
As an American, I hope and pray that common sense and basic morality
prevail in Washington DC, terminating the Salvador Option before it gets
off the ground. Failing that, I hope that the programme of
US-backed death squads is defeated. That is the most pro-American
sentiment I can muster, given the situation as it currently
stands.<br><br>
</font><font size=2><i>Scott Ritter was a senior UN arms inspector in
Iraq between 1991 and 1998. He is now an independent
consultant.<br><br>
<b>The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily
reflect the editorial position or have the endorsement of
Aljazeera.<br>
</i></b></font><font size=3>Aljazeera<br><br>
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