La Opci

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on “the El Savador option”:

What united opponents of American policy in Central America was a vague sense that we were on the wrong side. They tittered at Reagan’s declaration that the Contras were freedom fighters. They made movies that turned the leftists into the good guys in El Salvador. John Kerry, Pat Leahy, Tom Harkin, and other titans of international statesmanship actively worked against American foreign policy. “I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do,” Kerry said about American relations with the Soviet client Sandanista regime. He lent his name to support groups aiding the Communist-controlled regions of El Salvador.

I have no doubt that opposition to the “death squads” was also based on revulsion at some of their excesses. But there can be no doubt that they were also vexed that we were fighting Communists at all. Moreover, our special forces were not sent to El Salvador to train anybody to murder people. They were sent to help stop the widespread civil chaos and murder being perpetrated by others. They largely succeeded.

So I have to ask, would the Left oppose the “El Salvador Option” in Iraq if they didn’t have a similar ideological hang-up about our efforts there? We’re told that opponents of Iraq are part of the bipartisan consensus on fighting the war on terror, from which they claim Iraq is a distraction. Okay, maybe. But why then do opponents of the Iraq effort seem determined to ignore the fact that the most prominent leader of the “insurgency” has been hired as al Qaeda’s man in Iraq?

Read the rest; watch out for the giant spear in the middle of it.