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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Faurot who wrote (33614)	12/25/2003 1:49:42 PM
From: Rick Faurot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Iraq: Quicksand & Blood By Robert Parry November 13, 2003 George W. Bush and his top advisers learned little from the Vietnam debacle of the 1960s, since most avoided service in the war. But many top Bush aides played key roles in the repression of leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s, a set of lessons the Bush administration is now trying to apply to the violent resistance in Iraq. The key counterinsurgency lesson from Central America was that the U.S. government can defeat guerrilla movements if it is willing to back a local power structure, no matter how repulsive, and if Washington is ready to tolerate gross human rights abuses. In Central America in the 1980s, those tactics included genocide against hundreds of Mayan villages in Guatemala’s highlands and the torture, rape and murder of thousands of young political activists throughout the region. [More on this below] The body dumps that have been unearthed across Central America are thus little different from the mass graves blamed on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, except in Central America they represented the dark side of U.S. foreign policy and received far less U.S. press scrutiny. Another lesson learned from the 1980s was the importance of shielding the American people from the ugly realities of a U.S.-backed "dirty war" by using P.R. techniques, which became known inside the Reagan administration as "perception management." The temptation to recycle these counterinsurgency strategies from Central America to Iraq is explained by the number of Reagan-era officials now back in prominent roles in George W. Bush's administration. They include Elliot Abrams, who served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America in the 1980s and is a National Security Council adviser to Bush on the Middle East; John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s and now Bush’s U.N. Ambassador; Paul Bremer a counter-terrorism specialist in the 1980s and Iraq’s civilian administrator today; Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was the senior military adviser to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the 1980s; and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a Republican foreign-policy stalwart in Congress two decades ago. Proxy Army cont'd