Learning something from history, anyway...

Apparently the Pentagon is considering a new option for handling the worsening situation in Iraq, being referred to as the Salvador option.

[In the early 1980s], 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.

Ah, there's nothing like a death squad. Civilians, be damned!

Question for the audience: How would Bush rationalize this kind of drastic option for Iraq (and nuking our possible future relations with the Arab world), given his insistence on nothing but good news about how things are going?

(via Follow Me Here)

Update: Atrios has a bit more on this crazed idea. I think he captures the whole wrongness when he opines,

Let's be clear, "death squads" are terrorists. Their goal is not simply to catch/kill suspected bad guys, but to frighten populations into submission. It's collective punishment of an entire population.

As Yglesias says, "This isn't much of a way to run a humanitarian intervention" . . .