Salvador Option

Nuke ‘em. Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out. Turn the Middle East into a parking lot. No, our “leaders” aren’t yet considering these options (at least not publicly), but the way things are going…

As you probably know by now, the Powers That Be are considering putting us in the same league as Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and the El Salvador government of the early 1980s. Death squads, hit squads – whatever you want to call them – would be created for the purpose of hunting down and killing Iraqi insurgent leaders and their sympathizers (and how loosely is the term “sympathizer” going to be defined?). Seriously! This isn’t just another bad movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris; this is for real.

Now, there’s no question that, being the mightiest military power in history, we have the ability to ultimately prevail in the Iraqi war. But before we round up and torture and murder every Arab who might have spoken to a rebel leader (or knows someone whose cousin has a friend whose roommate used to know an insurgent), why don’t we all just step back for a minute, take a deep breath, and focus.

Why are we in Iraq? Every reason given to us by the Chicken Hawks has been a lie. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Ixnay. Saddam Hussein conspiring with Osama bin Laden? Only in the warped funhouse of Dick Cheney’s imagination. Were any Iraqis involved in the 9/11 attacks? No. (Sorry to burst your bubble, Fox News.) This war was supposed to take just a few hours, involve no U.S. casualties (Bush actually said this to Pat Robertson before the March 2003 invasion), and American soldiers would be greeted with flowers and ice cream by throngs of grateful Iraqis. Riiight! To make the understatement of the century, this wasn’t thought through very well. For a Chicken Hawk, spouting out slogans and drumming up hysteria is much more fun than doing a bunch of boring research and planning.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. But we toppled him; he’s in jail and waiting to be tried for international war crimes. So, we’re still in Iraq because…

And now we might create Death Squads in Iraq to round up and eliminate anyone who seems the least bit suspicious, thereby putting us (and our Iraqi puppets) in the same league with Stalin and Hitler. Whew! It’s a good thing we got rid of Saddam Hussein. He was a dictator. Iraq was a police state!