Centerfield

Moral Quagmire?

Mark Kleiman has a post on his blog referencing a story from Newsweek on MSNBC concerning a plan that the Pentagon is apparently considering to try to stem the insurgency. According to the story

one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

The story compares this plan to the death squads used in El Salvador in the 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. 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.

Mark is pretty much outraged by this, especially this quote from a "military source":

He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

Mark seems to think this is similar to the death squad activities in El Salvador and is, thus, beyond the pale. I think Mark is exaggerating somewhat here. It appears that this plan is designed to target people actively aiding the insurgents from outside the country, not merely sympathizers or political opponents as the El Salvador death squads did. Still, I think it raises some troubling questions about what we are getting into, especially to the extent that it truly is designed to create a climate of fear among the Sunni population as the story and Mark suggest. I should emphasize, of course, that this is just a plan apparently under discussion and not something that is occuring now (so far as we know.)

It seems to me the crux of the problem is whether the insurgency is truly a broad-based nationalist movement or simply a sectarian movement controlled by ex-Saddam loyalists and Sunni militants. Obviously, the Administration believes or wants to believe it is the latter. My guess is it is a little of both.