Iraq: Quicksand & Blood

http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=521_0_1_0_C

By Robert Parry | 12.26.03

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George W. Bush and his top advisers learned little from the Vietnam debacle of the ‘60s, 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 ‘80s, a set of lessons the Bush administration is now trying to apply to the violent resistance in Iraq.

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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 ‘80s 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.”

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Perhaps one of the lessons of the current dilemma is that George W. Bush may have dug such a deep hole for U.S. policy in Iraq that even Guatemalan-style brutality applied to the Sunni Triangle would only deepen the well of anti-Americanism that already exists in many parts of Iraq and across much of the Islamic world.

-More, much much More-
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"There is nothing new under the sun."

Fantastic article.
Thanks!

:-)

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