Iraqification = Salvadorization + Vietnamization

New century, same old murderous thinking and action from the Pentagon and Republicans in the White House. Newsweek reports that the Bush administration is considering the "Salvador option" in Iraq, a political-military strategy imported from 1980s El Salvador where, "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."

The tens of thousands of peasants killed directly by the right-wing death squads or who died in the fantastically brutal civil war may disagree with these chardonnay conservatives' conclusions, but of course they don't meet with Rummy. Suddenly, Mark Danner's horrifying Massacre at El Mozote becomes required reading for understanding what we're doing in Iraq.

It's unclear exactly how, but the "Salvador option" would somehow converge with the process of substituting Iraqi soldiers and police - aka "security forces" - for the American troops and others who are presently leading the counterinsurgency in Iraq. This goal, of course, is latter-day Vietnamization, Nixon's plan for getting the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to fight the North Vietnamese army and its guerrilla allies in South Vietnam. Not even the hardest-dying Republican would consider Vietnamization a success, but that's not to say they won't try, try again in Iraq.

But another model of counterinsurgency operations was at play in Vietnam, too: Operation Phoenix, an American campaign to assassinate communist leaders throughout South Vietnam. Douglas Valentine has written about the use of the Phoenix model in Iraq, and his comments are only the more cogent now.

It's clear the Abu Ghraib was not the bottom of American misbehavior in Iraq: we can and apparently are capable of sinking much lower.