EL SALVADOR: Entering the Quagmire
Let me assure you that we are [providing military assistance to El Salvador] with the greatest prudence and caution and with the lessons of the past in mind. El Salvador is not another Vietnam....
...Walter J. Stoessel, Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, March 1981...
...5 Philip Agee, who admits to having forged many a document in his days with the CIA, examined the cache and concluded that at least two of the documents are partly or wholly fabrications, including the two most sensational: one that describes a shopping trip for arms through socialist 4 NACLA ReportMaylJune 1981 countries and one that purports to show a link between the guerrillas and the Cuban Department of Special Operations...
...sphere of influence...
...Search-and-destroy missions, aerial bombardments, pacification-all the techniques of Vietnam are now being used to terrorize and kill yet another peasant population...
...To cite one example, the White Paper claims that the documents provide "definitive evidence of the clandestine military support given by the Soviet Union...
...Senator Charles Percy (R-Ill...
...Statistics of armament shipments into El Salvador, supposedly drawn directly from the documents, were extrapolated, Mr...
...Thus the State Department distinction was swallowed: aid to a revolutionary movement is immoral and conspiratorial, while aid to an "established government" is a legitimate and disinterested act...
...It has been injected into the policy debate on El Salvador not by "nervous Nellies," as Senator Jesse Helms would have it, nor by loose leftist rhetoric...
...El Salvador is supposed to stay squarely within what is called the U.S...
...The right of self-determination, and what's more, the ability of Salvadoreans to judge their own interests and decide their own future, finds no space within the Reagan world view...
...After careful examination, we think the analogy to Vietnam is appropriate and even compelling...
...Parallels in language and actions are discussed at national security meetings, while official briefings on El Salvador are punctuated by assurances that Comparisons between El Salvador and Vietnam are heard frequently these days-in Congress, at protest rallies, in editorials and at State Department briefings...
...Other reports indicated a similar scarcity of arms in battle areas across the country...
...It requires convincing the American public that it's time to shake "the Vietnam Syndrome" once and for all...
...NACLAReportMaylJune 1981 3 "another Vietnam" is not in the making...
...agreed to "draw the line" in El Salvador even while admitting that its junta members are "as unpopular with their own people as was Vietnam...
...5. Ralph McGehee, "The C.I.A...
...interests and security...
...and still others called it a "noble war" that was lost through failure of will...
...You now have the all-purpose formula for explaining to the American people why U.S...
...By depicting the opposition as puppets of the Soviet Union, any amount of U.S...
...Add the FMLN guerrillas as the new puppets of a foreign master...
...But each wave of' resignations by respected civilian politicians, each massacre of peasant farmers and each body found with tied thumbs and missing limbs, frustrated his efforts to affix a centrist label to a government that just wouldn't behave...
...For an excellent analysis of U.S...
...That step-by-step escalation only encourages the enemy and gives domestic dissidents an issue...
...Ralph McGehee, a 25-year veteran of the CIA and recipient of the Agency's Career Intelligence Medal, wrote this response to the miraculous discovery: "Where the necessary circumstances or proofs are lacking to support U.S...
...Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 8, 1981...
...2 As for captured weapons displayed by the Salvadorean National Guard, the Financial Times of London wrote, "The haul from Conchagua was typical: two dozen First World War rifles, two 19th-century Mausers, three Russian hand grenades, and one automatic rifle of the type used by the Atlantic Alliance...
...2 Reagan and Haig fall into this last category...
...This information now is attributed by the State Department to other, still-secret sources...
...National debate was smothered by sheer relief at the war's conclusion and buried by those with little to gain from a serious examination of their policies and deeds...
...Ronald Reagan quickly dropped all pretense of tying U.S...
...Nowhere in the documents is there any mention of 800 or 200 tons...
...Some called it "a tragic mistake" because so many lives were lost in support of a corrupt and ruthless regime...
...Some see dangerous parallels between the two wars, while others dismiss the Vietnam analogy as "an exercise in emotion, not analysis...
...3 Such accounts cast doubt on the extent of outside aid alleged by the Reagan Administration, and tend to substantiate guerrilla claims that arms are bought on the black market, manufactured in underground plants or captured in military actions...
...John Dinges, "Documents Tell a Different Tale," In These Times (Chicago), April 1-7, 1981...
...Much information in the White Paper can't be found in the documents at all...
...aid to El Salvador's military, begun in 1950, escaped media comment...
...Vietnam Had White Papers Too Jimmy Carter tried to justify U.S...
...The Administration's argument is as simple as that...
...Plug in Cuba as the surrogate where North Vietnam once fit...
...Glassman concedes...
...Counterinsurgency, the doctrine developed specifically for Vietnam, is today the essence of U.S...
...The authenticity of 18 pounds of documents, allegedly captured from guerrilla safe-houses by Salvadorean security forces, was never questioned...
...support for the Salvadoreanjuntas (there were four of them between October 1979 and January 1981), by citing their efforts to reform the oligarchic structures of Salvadorean society...
...So we all drew our own lessons from Vietnam...
...Moreover, the documents include frequent complaints of Soviet "indecisiveness" and a cool reception in Moscow...
...Washington Post, June 9, 1981...
...Furthermore, the flow of U.S...
...military aid can be justified on national security grounds alone...
...Army regulars and their mutilated victims, Chalatenango Province.4 NACLA Report So give the Salvadoreans what they need now to win the war-and a little bit extra for insurance...
...The real distinction then, is that the United States, as the grand imperial power, views itself as having the exclusive prerogative of propping up or felling whomever it deems desirable...
...all that matters is the nature of the alternative...
...Financial Times (London), March 9, 1981...
...6 But even if authentic, the captured documents fall far short of substantiating the conclusions drawn by the State Department in its eightpage "summary...
...And convince the American people that it is far less painful to take the plunge than to wade into icy waters slowly and cautiously...
...Our objectives are limited: to help the government with its problems of training, equipment, repair and maintenance, mobility and re-supply...
...For Reagan, the nature of the Salvadorean junta is irrelevant...
...Where the summary cites 800 tons pledged by socialist countries, and 200 tons delivered by the time of the January offensive, the documents themselves suggest that only 10 tons ever made it across the Salvadorean border...
...3. Washington Post, February 20, 1981...
...Ex-Ambassador White, in a reversal of his previous position, told theJournal inJune, "The only thing that ever made me think that these documents were genuine was that they proved so little...
...James Petras, "White Paper on the White Paper," The Nation, March 28, 1981...
...Did Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson...
...Administration officials are sensitive to the domestic impact of the analogy...
...9 As for the vast flow of arms to guerrilla forces, that too has been called into question-months after it served as the pretext for emergency airlifts of U.S...
...Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1981...
...Substitute Soviet expansionism for "the red tide of communism in Asia...
...Also, Hodding Carter III's critical commentary on press coverage, "The El Salvador Crusade," Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1981...
...And it's unknown who did...
...arms...
...But how many Americans read Le Monde...
...That the government in question came to power by a coup d'etat, and rules by terror, is irrelevant to the argument...
...It is of little comfort, however, to hear that 56 U.S...
...At least initially, Congress fell into line...
...4. See "Text of State Department Report on Communist Support of Salvadorean Rebels," New York Times, February 24, 1981...
...others saw the war as part of a system-imperialism-that would continue to pit the United States against wars of national liberation until fundamental changes took place at home...
...9. Sources for this example, and many others, include: Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1981...
...What lessons are they referring to...
...Maslow and Arana, "Operation El Salvador," Newsweek, March 16, 1981...
...Francis Pisano of Le Monde wrote that, "Sixty-odd guerrilla fighters at San Lorenzo had between them a single bazooka and an automatic rifle, which had been taken from the Salvadorean Army only a few days earlier...
...press treatment of the "captured documents," see Jonathan Maslow and Ana Arana, "Operation El Salvador," Columbia Journalism Review (New York), May-June, 1981...
...0 Way back in January, the European press took the time to compare the State Department claims of arms shipments to battlefield conditions...
...Beyond official rationales, the parallels to Vietnam are most vividly present on the battlefield...
...The cure must be short and drastic...
...Stretch the equation across the Central American isthmus to imperil Mexico, the super-domino that succeeds Japan as the ultimate target of this creeping menace...
...intervention, the CIA creates the appropriate situations or else invents them and disseminates its distortions worldwide via its media operations...
...It implies an assessment of the guerrilla forces in El Salvador as a less formidable enemy than Vietnam's victorious NLF, with no dense jungles to hide in and, as we were also asked to believe in Vietnam, diminishing support from the local population...
...8. Ibid...
...El Salvador is not another Vietnam, then, only if the strategy works and "our side" wins before there's a need for American combat troops...
...But the Reagan Administration forgot its own distinction when it announced it was considering supplying military aid to the defeated UNITA forces in their effort to overthrow the government of Angola...
...prestige is at stake in a country so intrinsically unimportant to U.S...
...Some of the guerrilla fighters on the slopes of the San Vicente volcano were armed with pistols, rifles, machetes and even slings...
...The State Department summary of the White Paper was reprinted and regurgitated in every major paper...
...a late-flying dove on Vietnam, currently Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bodies pile up behind the San Salvador morgue...
...It is no more reassuring to be told that President Reagan does not foresee the need for American combat troops...
...The Administration itself, by replaying the rationales and formulas of the 1960s, has evoked the memory of Vietnam and made the analogy stick...
...3 The press was equally amenable to this new formula for intervention...
...A Wall Street Journal article, which appeared several months after the White Paper made headlines around the world, presents a thorough indictment of the White Paper's accuracy, and casts doubt upon the authenticity of the documents themselves.7 Based on lengthy interviews with State Department officials, includingJon Glassman, the man who allegedly discovered the documents in San Salvador, the article points out the following: "Several of the most important documents, it's obvious, were attributed to guerrilla leaders who didn't write them...
...Yet a reading of the documents shows a one-way plane ticket from Moscow to Vietnam for a guerrilla emissary as the only concrete instance of Soviet aid...
...references ENTERING THE QUAGMIRE 1. Editorial, "Salvaging El Salvador," The New Republic, March 21, 1981, p. 5. 2. For an excellent analysis of these lessons unlearned, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press), 1979...
...aid and advice to the Salvadorean junta...
...7. Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1981...
...The White Paper released by the State Department on February 23, 1981, purporting to prove "the central role played by the Communist countries" in El Salvador, was essential to supplying that justification and shedding Carter's burden of proof as to the junta's good intentions...
...military advisers in El Salvador will not go out on combat missions (the first 500 advisers in Vietnam were technically "civilians...
...And in questionable ways, it seems...
...6. Latin America Weekly Report (London), April 3, 1981...
...Convince the real enemy (Moscow) that the United States will not hesitate along the way, and will stop at nothing short of victory...
...The regular guerrillas had FAL [Belgian] automatic rifles...
...4 Forgotten by the once again gullible press were the two White Papers on Vietnam which (investigations revealed only much later) had merely provided the public, press and even part of Congress with a rationale for policy which had been put in place months before...
...and the White Paper on El Salvador," The Nation, April 11, 1981...
...In American newspapers, on radio and on TV, the "sinister" notion of outside aid to the guerrillas was reinforced daily until it became a litany...
...What lesson did they learn from Vietnam...
...And most disturbing of all is the notion that Vietnam will not be repeated because the lessons of that war have not been forgotten...
...aid to reform, and embarked on a policy utterly consistent in its conspiratorial analysis of events...
...The official rationale for more arms and advisers to El Salvador plugs new variables into an old equation...
Vol. 15 • May 1981 • No. 3
