Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Free World Vignettes
the height of Reagan’s terror war in Central America, the respected
liberal commentator William Shannon described the terrorism in Latin
America as showing “a contempt for human life worthy of Joseph Stalin
and his murderous policemen,” referring, of course, to the guerrillas, not
to the state terrorists organized and supported by the United States. 49
Again, no commissar could be more loyal in defending state terror.
We might recall the debates of the past few years over whether it
would have been appropriate to use military force to intervene to stop
the terrible massacres under the Pol Pot regime. It is not easy to take
any of them very seriously. In the case of El Salvador, East Timor (where
the atrocities were comparable to Pol Pot, thanks to crucial US
assistance) and other places, no military intervention would have been
(or would now be) required to terminate terrible massacres; it would
only have been necessary to call off the hounds. The implications seem
obvious.
With the crushing of the urban organizations, the increasing technical
proficiency of the military, and the direct participation of US military
forces in reconnaissance and coordination, the war shifted to the
countryside, with no diminution of atrocities but less visibility. The
Central America correspondent of the conservative London Spectator
writes that death squad killings are “down to a handful every week,”
“but if the bright mood in the capital suggests that El Salvador is
returning to the fold of civilized nations, it is a consummate deception: it
is just that the war has moved from assassinations in the cities to
indiscriminate bombing in the countryside,” which is “happening every
day” while Duarte’s “strict rules about aerial bombardment” are simply
“scoffed at” by the military command. The practice of “draining the sea”
by “heavy and repeated bombing” and murderous groundsweeps “is not
new but it has got worse since the elected government of President
Duarte took power.” Mary Jo McConahay, one of the few US reporters to
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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