April 29, 2004, 8:42 a.m.
Dubya’s El Salvador
Success in Central America, not Vietnam failure, is the model for Iraq.

By D. J. McGuire

Nearly 30 years after it ended, the Vietnam War has, in the minds of some, come back to life in the Middle East. With every snippet of news from the battlefield — especially if it's bad — the debate gets a little hotter on both sides.

The entire episode has given me a strange feeling of déjà vu. The first time I heard the phrase, "another Vietnam," was 20 years ago, and back then, the would-be debacle in question was El Salvador. Iraq today far more closely resembles that place than Vietnam.

To understand this, cast your mind back to Central America, circa 1981. El Salvador was emerging from under a brutal, repressive regime, but death squads still roamed the country. The Reagan Administration was deeply involved transforming it into a functioning state with a republican form of government. Meanwhile, the Communist regime of Nicaragua, El Salvador's neighbor, was openly supporting a Marxist insurgency in the hope of destabilizing El Salvador and eventually installing a puppet regime.

Those who follow Iraqi affairs closely will find this all very familiar. Syria has turned its border with Iraq into a superhighway for Baathist thugs to run riot in its neighbor. Meanwhile, the Iranian mullahs have been spending up to $70 million a month to radicalize Iraqi Shiites — and to kill those who refuse to be cowed. They have also been aiding Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric who has openly allied with Iran's terror arm, Hezbollah.

Some will note that Nicaragua had something Syria and Iran did not have — backing from the Soviet Union. Don't be so sure about that. While the USSR is no more, Communist China has spent over a decade building ties to both Syria and Iran. China was instrumental in advancing Iran's nuclear ambitions, and has also sold weapons to Iran for years. While the Chinese have largely used their North Korean satellite-state to help arm Syria, they have cultivated strong ties to the Assad family operation. In fact, one cadre used a ceremony for Syria-PRC "cooperation" agreements to blast Israel as a "colonialist plot aimed at detaching from the Arab nation a part that is dear to it — Palestine." That previously unknown cadre was none other than Hu Jintao, now general secretary of the Chinese Communist party and president of the People's Republic of China.

Thus, the analogy to Central America is quite apt, and far better as a model than the hackneyed Vietnam references. This is good news, for the solution in Central America will also work here: Destabilize the enemy to keep him from bothering you.

In the early 1980's, the U.S. helped to bring together various anti-Communist groups in Nicaragua and then melded them into the contras. The purpose of this force, at least in part, was to keep Daniel Ortega's regime too distracted to meddle in El Salvador. Less than a decade later, this small action, scorned and derided by elitists, Democrats, and liberals everywhere, was a smashing success. As the contras grew in strength, Ortega was forced to redirect his energies to maintaining his own regime; El Salvador's Marxists were left isolated; and the nation's transition to normalcy was all but complete by 1989, when the Marxists disarmed and the civil war ended. Meanwhile, the contras became so strong that they were incorporated into the Reagan Doctrine of rolling back Communism in Nicaragua itself. That aim was achieved in the election of 1990, when Ortega went down in a landslide defeat.

The situation in Syria is beginning to look like Nicaragua in 1981: Syrian Kurds, energized by what their Iraqi brethren have achieved, are clamoring for freedom, while a more general pro-democracy movement is germinating throughout the country. By supporting this growing anti-Baathist movement within Syria, the U.S. would force Syria out of the Iraq infiltration business, and in time could lead to liberalization in Syria itself.

Iran is riper still for a fall. Few in the Islamic Republic believe in Khomeinism anymore. The late Khomeini's own number two, Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, has called it a failure (and done so loud enough to be placed under house arrest on occasion), while the grandson of the founder has openly begged for the American military to liberate his country. Anti-mullah protestors regularly and repeatedly take to the streets to demand change, and in many case the regime has to use hired thugs to bypass local security forces who won't attack their own in order to put down the demonstrations. Fifty years ago, the CIA helped up-end an Iranian government whose support at home was ebbing quickly. Today, America is facing an Iranian regime hated within its own country; the right help, in the right places could knock the mullahs down without a single shot fired from an American's gun.

The only difference between El Salvador of the 1980s and the Iraq of today is the American military presence, but this makes taking action more imperative, not less. Unlike El Salvador, the anti-democratic thugs in Iraq are killing Americans. Every day we delay in acting against Damascus and Tehran, we are further putting the lives of our men and women in uniform in danger. This cannot be tolerated and must not continue.

The regimes in Syria and Iran are deathly afraid of a republican form of government in Iran, as are the Iraqi Baathists, the Khomeinists they support, and their mutual benefactors in Beijing. The reasons for supporting dissident movements against these tyrannies should be beyond dispute even without the need to protect American soldiers. The fact that these regimes give aid and comfort to those who kill our servicemen make acting against them a moral imperative.

Several officials currently in the Bush administration were "present at the creation" of the Central American policy that became the greatest and least known success in recent American geopolitical history. Perhaps if they could look past 1975 and shift their historical gaze a little closer to home this obvious path to freedom in the Middle East and victory for America against terror will become clear to them. In the meantime, every attempt they make to "engage" Syria and Iraq is another bullet fired, or bomb detonated, against our men and women in uniform. It has to stop, and it has to stop now.

— D. J. McGuire is president and cofounder of the China e-Lobby. He is the author of Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror.

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