Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Iraqi Death Squads

The latest outrage coming from the Bush Administration is the plan to start up 'Death Squads' a la El Salvador or Honduras to deal with the insurgency (link, link, link). Plenty has already said about how horribly immoral an idea this is, but another concern strikes me. Even if there were some moral justification for this, how would this work.

In Honduras and El Salvador there was a substantial portion of the population who supported the folks who operated and ran the Death Squads there during the '80s. Who is going to run and organize them in Iraq? They can hardly be US forces, we are already launching raids, seizing civilians and so forth. Calling our men Death Squads will hardly make a positive difference. Are we going to try and recruit some Sunni forces to man these Death Squads? Sunnis, the segment of the population most opposed to our presence, are going to start working with us on a project like this? Will the men manning the Squads be treated any differently than the Sunnis who work with the occupation now (i.e. get assassinated). Or will it be Shia? Or Kurds? Or mixed? It seems that none of these options is very good, and will mostly promote ethnic tensions within Iraq and encourage the other groups to greater efforts at insurgency. Not to mention the potential problems of having the coming election produce a Shia government that is already well equipped with teams of Death Squads.

The plan seems to be not only immoral, but poorly thought out and generally unworkable.

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2 Comments:

At 2:31 PM, Blogger Rosemary Welch said...

Good news. Sec. Rumsfeld has come out and strongly refuted any talk about death squads. You are aware, of course with any large organization, some people are unhappy with the Sec. of Def. because he is rearranging it for the first time in 50(?) years. Feathers are getting ruffled. Why not try to get rid of the feather ruffler than actually solve some problems? This I do not agree with. After all, Ashcroft is leaving so they need another target. I know you may believe that I may not have character, but what were you doing on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2004? I have written many articles about Darfur, Sudan. I don't get any replies though. I know you care. Maybe you are just unaware? Support Sudan this weekend, Sudan: Peace or War, Thinking outside of the box, Just thought you may be interested in joining something we CAN do, instead of replaying those things we cannot. I pray for your help. Not for myself, for them.

 
At 1:39 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have some great ideas :) Nevermind. Next time.

 

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