The phoenix rises again

In the run-up to World War II, Hitler tried to deport German Jews. No one, including the US, would take them or more than a handful of them, for fear they might become "public charges." It was then that Hitler moved to his "final solution" - extermination. As the war progressed, some American pacifists, including the noteworthy A. J. Muste, urged a ceasefire, predicting that further German losses would only cause the gas chambers to run longer and faster.

They were right.

The point here is that this was an extreme illustration of a basic point: The more nations and armies, whether "regular" or guerrilla, lose in war, the more brutal they become in attempting to turn defeat into victory. It's a pattern we now see emerging in Iraq. Newsweek, January 8:

What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option" - and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can't just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." ...

[T]he Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, 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.

The key word there is "sympathizers." That is, it was a program of assassination, of murder, aimed not just at rebel soldiers but at anyone, including civilians, including noncombatants, who might be in agreement with them, a program designed to dominate through death and terror. Applied in Iraq, it would be no different.

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. ...

One military source ... suggests that 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," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

We have to, that is, use Kurds and Shiites to kill and terrorize Sunnis - all the while telling ourselves, no doubt, that we are thereby avoiding sectarian war.

The article does get two things wrong, however; two things beyond devoting so much space to a ridiculous, lengthy discussion of just who would be in charge of the program, as if that mattered more than what the idea of it says about us and what the implementation of it would mean to Iraqis. Those two are the notions that this is something new for Iraq and that it dates back only to Ronald Reagan.

In fact, the notion of forming a secret paramilitary group of Iraqis, this one among former Iraqi exiles, was revealed a whole year ago in The American Prospect, which noted it was to be financed with $3 billion "tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November." Even at that time,

[e]xperts [said] it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists....

When I posted about this at the time, I noted that the article made a comparison to an earlier program - but it was not from El Salvador, it was from Vietnam: the Phoenix Program. Quoting from a copy of a proffer (testimony submitted as part of an appeal) in my possession which said

[p]etitioner was further informed that the program sought to accomplish through capture, intimidation, elimination and assassination, what United States up to this time, was unable to accomplish through the conventional use of military power, i.e., (to win the war),

I said that the "Phoenix Program was begun precisely because the US military could not win its war, so it resorted to torture and terror and 'termination with extreme prejudice,' in the classic phrase."

Then, as now, these are acts of desperation, of people who know they are losing but lack the capacity to understand why or how. Then, thousands of Vietnamese died in a hidden reign of terror that increased the bloodshed and the bitterness without changing the outcome. And now? Is what's past to be prologue?

STDD>HO.

Footnote: Since I mentioned A. J. Muste, I'll also mention Noam Chomsky's noted essay on Muste's predictions of what sort of American empire would grow out of a US military victory in World War II. Still a worthwhile read.