The Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq
The American public is being prepared. If the attack on Iran
does come, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no
truth.
By
John Pilger
05/04/06 "ICH"
-- --
The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen
you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news;
pronouncements about a "civil war" and "sectarian violence" were
repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never
happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by
the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless
Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow
themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no
hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.
And when you left the lift, this followed you to your room, to
the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next
country. Such is the power of America's corporate propaganda,
which, as Edward Said pointed out in
Culture and Imperialism ,
"penetrates electronically" with its equivalent of a party line.
The party line changed the other day. For almost three years it
was that al-Qaeda was the
driving force behind the "insurgency", led by Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was
clearly being groomed for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein
enjoys. It mattered not that al-Zarqawi had never been seen
alive and that only a fraction of the "insurgents" followed
al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's role was to distract
attention from the thing that almost all Iraqis oppose: the
brutal Anglo-American occupation of their country.
Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian violence"
and "civil war", the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia
mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported in the
CNN "mainstream", is that the Salvador Option has been invoked
in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed
and trained by the US, which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The
goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the break-up of
Iraq, the original war aim of Bush's administration. The
ministry of the interior in Baghdad, which is run by the CIA,
directs the principal death squads. Their members are not
exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal are the
Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, headed by former senior
officers in Saddam's Ba'ath Party. This unit was formed and
trained by CIA "counter-insurgency" experts, including veterans
of the CIA's terror operations in central America in the 1980s,
notably El Salvador. In his new book, Empire's Workshop
(Metropolitan Books), the American historian Greg Grandin
describes the Salvador Option thus: "Once in office, [President]
Reagan came down hard on central America, in effect letting his
administration's most committed militarists set and execute
policy. In El Salvador, they provided more than a million
dollars a day to fund a lethal counter-insurgency campaign . . .
All told, US allies in central America during Reagan's two terms
killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands and
drove millions into exile."
Although the Reagan administration spawned the current Bushites,
or "neo-cons", the pattern was set earlier. In Vietnam, death
squads trained, armed and directed by the CIA murdered up to
50,000 people in Operation Phoenix. In the mid-1960s in
Indonesia CIA officers compiled "death lists" for General
Suharto's killing spree during his seizure of power. After the
2003 invasion, it was only a matter of time before this
venerable "policy" was applied in Iraq.
According to the investigative writer Max Fuller (National
Review Online), the key CIA manager of the interior ministry
death squads "cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to
direct the US military mission in El Salvador". Professor
Grandin names another central America veteran whose job now is
to "train a ruthless counter-insurgent force made up of ex-Ba'athist
thugs". Another, says Fuller, is well-known for his "production
of death lists". A secret militia run by the Americans is the
Facilities Protection Service, which has been responsible for
bombings. "The British and US Special Forces," concludes Fuller,
"in conjunction with the [US-created] intelligence services at
the Iraqi defence ministry, are fabricating insurgent bombings
of Shias."
On 16 March, Reuters reported the arrest of an American
"security contractor" who was found with weapons and explosives
in his car. Last year, two Britons disguised as Arabs were
caught with a car full of weapons and explosives; British forces
bulldozed the Basra prison to rescue them. The Boston Globe
recently reported: "The FBI's counter-terrorism unit has
launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after
discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car
bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and
Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen
in the United States, according to senior government officials."
As I say, all this has been tried before - just as the
preparation of the American public for an atrocious attack on
Iran is similar to the WMD fabrications in Iraq. If that attack
comes, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no
truth. Imprisoned in the Hilton lift, staring at CNN, my fellow
passengers could be excused for not making sense of the Middle
East, or Latin America, or anywhere. They are isolated. Nothing
is explained. Congress is silent. The Democrats are moribund.
And the freest media on earth insult the public every day. As
Voltaire put it: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can
make you commit atrocities."
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the
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