The ‘Salvador Option’

"Roots of Iraq Civil War May Be in ‘Salvador Option’ In January 2005, Newsweek reported that the Bush Administration was considering using the “Salvador option” against insurgents in Iraq:

[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.

It should come as no surprise, then, that sectarian death squads tied directly to the Iraqi Interior Ministry are running rampant in Iraq. Today we learned that the head of the Baghdad morgue has fled the country in fear for his life after reporting that the units have killed more than 7,000 people since last summer". Think Progress Just more fuel to what will lead these Iraqi factions to continue their centuries old hatred for each other.