Well Thank God Saddam's Gone

Or else we'd still have death squads and torture and human rights abuses.

What's that you say?

Crap.

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.)

What do you know - Tom Friedman was right! Turns out, the US can't liberate Iraq, and never could. Gee, it'd be funny except for the corpses. Anyone else wonder what it smells like in Fallujah lately?

Also, notice the phrasing - the death squads were considered a success - "despite the deaths of innocent civilians". Because as we all know, extrajudicial paramilitary squads committing atrocities are okay so long as they only kill, maim and torture evil people. Of course, if you try to retroactively determine who was and wasn't evil, well then the terrorists have won, haven't they?

So, a question for those old enough to remember: Are these assholes scarier than Reagan, or what? Because, if these guys didn't make you all collectively eat a gun back then, I wonder what they'd have to do - rape puppies? Make pies out of kindergartners? Seriously, have we all lowered our own moral thresholds so far that this is acceptable again?

(I came across this story from Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution, a blog far smarter and funnier than this one. Seriously, if you have to choose between this blog and his, choose Jon. This post is just one of many reasons.)