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.