Bill Marina over on L&P has linked to an MSNBC article that reveals the Pentagon is seriously contemplating officially employing assassination squads in Iraq against the insurgents. The Pentagon is calling it the Salvador Option. What’s next for the Bush Administration? Well, get a load of this comment I added to Marina’s post:
I don’t know if you noticed this Mr. Marina, but one can easily put a rather disturbing interpretation on this quotation from the article you link to:
Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he 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.”
So… What, is the US going to start intentionally and officially to selectively target Iraqi civilians – who cooperate with the insurgents or fail to cooperate with the US military – with beatings, torture, maiming, and death? Not that this doesn’t already happen, but the key words here are intentionally, officially, and selectively.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the