Update [2005-1-9 11:9:45 by Armando]: Promoted from the Diaries by Armando. I made some slight changes, repeating part of a quote from below the fold on the front and added bold for emphasis on some text.Man, when they put Negroponte in charge of Iraq, I never thought he'd be able to use his experience this well. Now please, keep in mind, this is Newsweek reporting this. It's not CBS, it's not the NYT, it's not the Washington Times, its not Drudge.
What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon's latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"--and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can't just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November's operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency--as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time--than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 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.
Emphasis supplied.
