krebscycle

Gian Gentile: In COIN, a precondition for success is the existence of a legitimate government. The United States has one success in the history of counterinsurgency since WW II to its credit: it succeeded in assisting the legitimate government of El Salvador defeat an internal communist insurgency. However, it was not the U.S. military that defeated the FMLN guerrillas, but the Salvadoran military under the control of its own government, with U.S. encouragement and no more than 50 or so U.S. military advisors. Moreover, El Salvador was not simply a sovereign state: El Salvadoran society was and is a single identity – an essential prerequisite for successful internal defense of a government struggling for survival and legitimacy.

The Salvador military with US advisors, at work:

Early the next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire village in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked them in separate groups in the church, the convent, and various houses.^[7]

During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture, and execute the men in several locations.^[8] Around noon, they began taking the women and older girls in groups, separating them from their children and machine gunning them after raping them.^[9] Girls as young as 10 were raped, with soldiers reportedly heard bragging how they especially liked the twelve-year-old girls.^[10] Finally, they killed the children at first by slitting their throats, then by hanging them from trees, with one child as young as two years old.^[11] After killing the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.

The soldiers remained in El Mozote that night but the next day went to the village of Los Toriles, some 2 km away and carried out a further massacre. Men, women and children were taken from their homes, lined up, robbed and shot and their homes then set ablaze

Gentile was one of the realists in the Iraq War – who didn’t join in the COIN cheerleading. Yet he kind of lacks moral center.

See also The miracle of US counterintelligence