El Salvador in Iraq? It wouldn’t work anyway

It looks like the U.S. military establishment has considered that analogy as one possibility for moving beyond the current situation in Iraq.

We would find the Iraqi equivalent of right-wing murderous thugs, train them, at School of the Americas establishing a satellite campus in Iraq or something,

The nightmare of El Salvador, and the nightmare squared of using that as a model in Iraq, aside, I doubt this would actually work.

I don’t doubt our government would be dumb enough to try, though.

First, it was a right-wing government in El Salvador. Throwing out Cold War understandings of “right” and “left,” the Maliki government in Baghdad still doesn’t fit the bill.

The only people friendly to us all along are Chalabi’s secular Shi’ites, now laughably and thoroughly discredited.

The Awakened Sunnis? They’re not the government, never will form a majority, and never will get close to that if they’re suspected of getting any more backing than they’ve already gotten.

The Kurds? Only if we’re OK with a de facto autonomous Kurdistan, rather than a Kurdish government ruling a united Iraq.