Fucking Death Squads.

In the ongoing "I Love the 80s" episode that is the United States these days, the Bush Administration is now talking about bringing back another golden oldie: death squads.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the 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. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time.)

I can't believe the equivocating about Negroponte, suggesting that a high-level official in Central America knew nothing about Reagan Administration policy in the region. But the rest of the story sounds about right, and is deeply disturbing, and shows that there is almost nothing left to do in Iraq. The smell of desperation is all over this war, with conservatives either running for cover or grabbing at straws over just what to do. I guess torturing largely innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib didn't work, I guess conventional military operations (albeit 6 months late, in the case of Falljua) didn't work, so how else can we stop the insurgency? I know, through death squads!

I can already hear the other side calling liberals pussies for not wanting to get serious about fighting terrorism, but if you can't see the type of policy the Pentagon is considering as state-sanctioned terror, then there's no debate that can properly be had. We shouldn't judge ourselves by the standard of "well, we're not quite as bad as the terrorists," by the way. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard; otherwise, we'll never be able to prove that our system of government and way of life is preferable to the greater Muslim world at large. In other words, a country whose Attorney General nominee has to say in a confirmation hearing before the Senate that he "is firmly against torture" is a country that has ceded the moral high ground, and instituting death squads won't exactly help getting it back.