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Death squads: A bad idea
revisited
By Jason Vest
WASHINGTON - The US periodical Newsweek
revealed on Sunday that the Pentagon is
considering an effort in Iraq that human-rights
groups say more closely resembles a dark and
desperate homage to D'Aubissonism than an actual
policy initiative.
Harkening back to the
days when the administration of president Ronald
Reagan and its Salvadoran proxies, led by the
extreme right-wing political leader Roberto
D'Aubuisson, were fighting a "losing war" with the
leftist rebels of the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front (FMLN), Newsweek recalled how
"the US government funded or supported
'nationalist' forces that allegedly included
so-called 'death squads' directed to hunt down and
kill rebel leaders and sympathizers".
Adding that "many US conservatives
consider the policy to have been a success -
despite the deaths of innocent civilians" (perhaps
the understatement of the year so far, given the
low-end estimate of 40,000 civilians dead) - the
magazine reported that the Pentagon may apply this
approach to Iraq, deploying US Special Forces
teams to "advise, support and possibly train Iraqi
squads to target Sunni insurgents and their
sympathizers".
This may be the best
indicator to date as to just how far around the
bend the current crop of Pentagonistas has gone in
their bid to check the insurgency they never
thought could happen.
This is not just
because Pentagon hawks are apparently still
rationalizing away murdered Salvadorans. It's also
because the US military's own scholarship over the
past 20 years holds that that the United States'
military and political counterinsurgency efforts
in El Salvador are at best a case study in how to
prolong an insurgency, and not an approach worthy
of emulation.
In a 1991 paper for the US
Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Major
Robert J Coates characterized the conflict - then
in its 12th year - as far from the "success" the
administration of President George W Bush now
claims it was, but rather as an ongoing
"insurgency to be defeated".
Having been a
US military adviser to the El Salvadoran Armed
Forces (ESAF), Coates was certainly in a position
to know.
Contrary to rosy reports about
the ESAF's "improvements", Coates characterized
its officer corps as one so "riddled with
corruption" and inhumane to its own soldiers
("officers view the enlisted men as a replaceable
commodity") that it was "detrimental to the war
effort", so much so that it had actually "aided
the insurgency's ability to prolong the war".
Coates' report was, however, really only a
shorter, updated version of 1989's "American
Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El
Salvador" by the conservative quartet of Andrew
Bacevich, James Hallums, Richard White and Thomas
Young - all, at the time, US Army
lieutenant-colonels.
In essence, their
conclusion was that a decade of billions of
dollars in US military and civil aid had
accomplished little but preserving a wretched
status quo with no end in sight.
Unlike
many who start from the errant presumption that
counterinsurgency is primarily a military, rather
than political, affair, the colonels held that any
US-backed military counterinsurgency efforts had
to be conducted only as support for a program of
real social, political, economic and military
reform, with an "honest and responsive government"
as a partner.
In El Salvador, the officers
found, US aid in the name of counterinsurgency had
created a defining paradigm in which the
Salvadoran military and its proxies pursued a
campaign of "lavish brutality, fail[ing] to
distinguish between dissenters and
revolutionaries", killing tens of thousands - many
of whom had nothing to do with the FMLN -
reflecting a "US policy built on a foundation of
corpses".
So concluded Benjamin Schwartz,
the RAND Corp analyst tasked with assessing El
Salvador policy for the Department of Defense.
Drawing on his own experiences for a December 1998
Atlantic Monthly review of William Leo Grande's
excellent "Our Own Backyard: The United States in
Central America, 1977-1992", Schwartz noted that
while victory was elusive, the "dirty little
secret" to maintaining a perpetual stalemate was
that "death squads worked".
Looking back
with revulsion on the bipartisan enabling of mass
murder - with Republicans "greatly exaggerating"
the human-rights achievements of what they knew
was a perpetually "homicidal regime" and Democrats
pursuing a policy of "meaningless threats",
getting the occasional unenforceable condition
attached to aid that they would never block -
Schwartz summed up "counterinsurgency" in El
Salvador as a policy that "demanded nothing less
than that America effect fundamental changes in
the country's authoritarian culture, its political
practices, and its economic, social and military
structure".
"Such a project used to be
called, presumptuously, 'nation-building' ... What
is indisputable is that for a decade American
policymakers in Washington and American civilian
and American military personnel in El Salvador
consorted with [murderers] and sadists."
As Schwartz and others have noted, the end
of the war in El Salvador had little to do with a
triumph of military counterinsurgency or the
effectiveness of US "nation-building" efforts, but
with the end of the Cold War.
With the
mighty Sovieticus gone, the Salvadoran government
knew Tio Sam would no longer be so effusive with
aid and accommodating of murder, and finally the
government sat down and negotiated a peace with
the FMLN.
This illustrated one of many
lessons about the US efforts in El Salvador:
"American involvement in counterinsurgency,"
observed the Army War College's Steve Metz, "is
often like lending money to a chronic gambler - it
postpones real resolution of the problem rather
than speeding it."
So what, then, is the
real import of the El Salvador counterinsurgency
experience to Iraq? At best, a cautionary study in
comparisons.
First, in terms of actual
soldiering, the Iraqi military is just as bad as,
if not worse than, the Salvadoran army.
Second, not only does Iraq currently lack
a real government, but based on the Sunni boycott
of elections, it's not going to have a truly
legitimate, representative government.
Third, despite the US government's crowing
about civil and economic assistance to make Iraq a
better place, whatever government Iraq does have
will, on the Salvador model, likely be allowed to
be as ineffectual, brutal or corrupt as it wants -
because, as was the case in Salvador, the
imperative of staving off the guerrillas will
trump all, as it reflects a US strategic
national-security objective.
There may be
some optimists in the US executive - as well as
Democratic enablers in Congress - who think that
the Salvador model can be deployed in a way that
also applies lessons learned from Salvador without
repeating them in Iraq.
For that to work,
though, the US government and its army actually
need a modern counterinsurgency doctrine and
training regimen - which, as a recent generation
of young officer-scholars and military historians
continue to note, it doesn't have.
(Inter
Press Service) |
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