Rohan Pearce
When the WMD myths evaporated, the "coalition of the willing" was left grasping the ostensibly humanitarian justifications for the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Democracy, human rights and liberty for Iraqis — these were the watchwords brandished by the apologists for US President George Bush and his cohorts as their armed forces rampaged through the country.
But in the new Iraq, democracy and liberty seem curiously elusive when, over a year since the "handover of power" to an Iraqi government, it's still the White House and US Central Command that call most of the shots. As for human rights, the ferocity of the repression unleashed by the US-led occupation forces against their opponents, sometimes directly and sometimes by proxy, seems to indicate that Iraqi freedom remains as mythical as Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Many of the crimes committed by the US-led occupying forces are relatively well-known — the mass killings of civilians in rebel areas like Fallujah, the checkpoint shootings and the brutal torture at Abu Ghraib and other detention centres. But in many ways these are the "official" human rights abuses committed under the auspices of the occupation regime. More sinister than these atrocities is what appears to be a secret war being waged by death-squad militias aligned to the US.
In January, US magazine Newsweek published an article on its website that revealed that figures in the Pentagon were "intensely debating" whether to employ the "Salvador option" in its struggle to crush armed anti-occupation forces in Iraq. An unnamed senior military officer told Newsweek: "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defence. And we are losing."
The "Salvador option" refers to the undeclared, secret war waged by the Ronald Reagan administration against a popular left-wing guerrilla movement in El Salvador led by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).
US-sponsored death squads unleashed an orgy of violence on Salvadoran workers and peasants to crush opposition to El Salvador's military regime. What Uncle Sam Really Wants, a 1992 book by renowned US dissident Noam Chomsky, quotes a description by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador, of how the "Salvador option" was implemented: "People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador — they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch."
The terror unleashed in El Salvador was not an innovation of the Reagan regime or their Salvadoran allies. During the Vietnam War similar campaigns of violence were unleashed by Washington to terrorise the peasant support base of the Vietnamese liberation forces. In the name of combating the "menace" of communism in Vietnam, the US carried out horrific programs of murder and torture, such as the infamous Operation Phoenix and the CORDS program (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support).
The primary targets of these programs weren't the Vietnamese fighters but their civilian supporters. Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program (Avon Books, 1992), described Operation Phoenix as "aimed at 'neutralising', through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture, the civilian infrastructure that supported the insurgency in South Vietnam. It was a terrifying 'final solution' that violated the Geneva Conventions and traditional American ideas of human morality."
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly denied the Newsweek story's claims. In response to a reporter's question at a January 11 press conference, he described them as "nonsense". But in February, the Wall Street Journal's Greg Jaffe filed a report from Baghdad on "irregular brigades" that were being used in an attempt to crush the insurgency. "We don't call them militias. Militias are ... illegal", US Major Chris Wales told Jaffe. "I've begun calling them 'irregular Iraqi ministry-directed brigades'." The other label US forces have tagged them with, Jaffe reported, is "pop-ups" (as in militias that pop up seemingly out of nowhere). Jaffe reported that the groups, which are often under the command of "friends and relatives of cabinet officers and tribal sheiks", "generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding".
Probably the most infamous of these paramilitary groups is the Special Police Commandos, a group that, according to Jaffe, was formed in September 2004 by Iraqi General Adnan Thavit. Thavit, as well as being an uncle of Iraq's then-interior minister, was involved in a 1996 coup attempt against Hussein. The coup was led by the Iraqi National Accord, a CIA-sponsored opposition organisation that carried out terrorist bombings inside Iraq between 1992 and 1995 and now holds a number of seats in the Iraqi parliament.
INA members include Iyad Allawi, who was installed by the US as the Iraqi prime minister in June 2004 and held that office until April 2005. According to the Newsweek report, Allawi was "said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option".
An analysis by Max Fuller, published on the website of the Centre for Research on Globalisation on June 2, argued that the "Salvador option" is being actively implemented in Iraq. Fuller argues that it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to draw a connection between a series of mass execution-style killings in Iraq and the areas where "pop-up" forces are known to have been operating.
Fuller reported that some of the strongest evidence was beginning to emerge in Baghdad, where accusations of responsibility for a series of mass killings had been directly levelled at "the state security forces and specifically against the Police Commandos".
"On 5 May a shallow mass grave was discovered in the Kasra-Wa-Atash industrial area containing 14 bodies. The victims, all young men, had been blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs and they had been executed with shots to the head. The bodies also revealed such torture marks as broken skulls, burning, beatings and right eyeballs removed ... the victims were Sunni farmers on their way to market. According to Phil Shiner of the British-based Public Interest Lawyers, the men had been arrested when Iraqi security forces raided the vegetable market."
The bodies of victims of similar execution-style killings were discovered on May 15. Fifteen bodies were found at two sites in Baghdad. At a funeral congregation for the men, who included "pro-insurgent clerics" according to a May 19 report by the British Financial Times, Hareth al Dhari, secretary-general of the pro-resistance Association of Muslim Scholars, said that they were victims of "state terrorism by the Ministry of Interior".
The FT reported: "Mr Dhari said [Hassan al Naimi, one of the victims] had been taken from his mosque on Monday night in the district of al-Shaab by uniformed troops of the Wolf Brigade, a police commando unit, accompanied by members of the Badr Brigade militia loyal to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq ... Naimi was 'one of the best and most upright men, well known for resisting the occupation', Mr Dhari said."
As the execution of Naimi, apparently at the hands of a government-sponsored death squad suggests, the "Salvador option" is not fundamentally a military solution to the occupation regime's inability to crush opposition to US rule in Iraq. Like Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, it's a political solution designed to terrorise Â鶹´«Ã½ of the population that aid or sympathise with opposition forces.
In a January 4 interview with the Arabic-language, London-based daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Major General Muhammad Abdallah al Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service, claimed that armed anti-occupation forces "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there ... is sympathetic to them". He claimed they "do not provide material or logistical help" to resistance forces, but they also "do not report their activities if they have the information". He explained: "Take for example the right side of the city of Mosul. From the security point of view, it is out [of] control. The terrorists are active in this side and the inhabitants there do not report them and very often shelter them."
Newsweek reported that, according to a "military source involved in the Pentagon debate" on the Salvador option, "new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency". "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists", the source told the magazine, adding: "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
"Changing that equation" means unleashing the state against opponents of the occupation. But it shouldn't be a surprise that the US occupiers are using such methods in the name of "liberating" Iraq. Saddam Hussein's original sin, after all, was not his brutal repression of opponents to his rule or his ruthless genocidal campaign against Iraqi Kurds' ambitions of independence; rather he was guilty of being too independent of Washington.
The evidence continues to mount that human rights abuses like the torture at Abu Ghraib and the slaughter of civilians in Fallujah by US forces are not aberrations. Instead, they're the real face of the US occupation regime in Iraq.
[Max Fuller's analysis "For Iraq, 'The Salvador Option' Becomes Reality" is available at .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 17, 2005.
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