Thread by @JewhadiTM

.@IlhanMN Omar’s Big Lie nationalreview.com/2019/02/ilhan-…

In a viral exchange at a congressional hearing last week, the new congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who is quickly establishing herself as the most reprehensible member of the House Democratic freshman class despite stiff competition, launched into Elliott Abrams.

She accused the former Reagan official and Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela of being complicit in war crimes.

“Yes or no,” she demanded, “would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving U.S. interest, as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?”

Omar was cribbing from the Left’s notes on U.S. Latin American policy, and doing it badly. She made much of the 1981 El Motoze massacre in El Salvador. The idea that Abrams is somehow directly implicated in this bloodcurdlingly awful event is completely absurd.

He was assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Reagan administration, then became assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs on December 10, 1981. The massacre occurred the next day.

Unless we are to believe the El Salvadoran military unit took his change of jobs as a green light to indiscriminately kill villagers (which unfortunately was not a new practice), Abrams obviously had nothing to do with the massacre.

Nonetheless, the Omar attack is an opportunity to examine the premises of the Left’s narrative on Reagan’s policy in El Salvador, which supports the persistent attacks on Abrams as a “war criminal.”

To paraphrase the famous Mary McCarthy line about Lillian Hellman, every word in this narrative is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

Salvador Was a Violent Mess Before Reagan Got Involved

First, some background. El Salvador was not a liberal bastion prior to the Reagan administration’s showing up. The political order in El Salvador had long depended on a partnership between oligarchs and the military.

Beginning in the 1960s, they fashioned rural paramilitaries to maintain their rule. In the late 1970s, upon increased leftist agitation, these groups began to target alleged subversives in the Church, or as one flyer from a death squad put it, “Be Patriotic — Kill a Priest.”

The country was undemocratic and coming apart at the seams. A former general, Carlos Humberto Romero, stole the 1977 election. His ascension brought more instability, violence, and repression.

Anyone who thinks this situation would have resolved itself easily and peacefully absent U.S. involvement should consider the example of Guatemala.

When the Guatemalan government, facing its own Communist insurrection, rejected military assistance from the U.S. in the late 1970s, it didn’t lead to a better outcome, but almost certainly a worse one.

“The absence of American advisors,” Crandall writes, “did not prevent the Guatemalan military from launching a genocidal, scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against Marxist guerrillas —

— or, more specifically, against the civilian and desperately poor Mayan population believed to be supporting these guerrillas.”

The FMLN Received Massive Foreign Support
Attacks on U.S. intervention always leave out the other foreign players.

Havana, Crandall writes, forged the El Salvadoran left-wing groups together into the FMLN and provided “significant logistical, intelligence, strategic, and military assistance.” And Nicaragua lent major support, shipping matériel to the guerrillas by sea and air.

At the outset, Hanoi offered the guerrillas 60 tons of arms. At one point the Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega said in a speech in Hanoi, “We sincerely thank the Vietnamese people and highly value their support for the heroic Salvadoran people.”

Ethiopia and Czechoslovakia also chipped in. None of this, of course, ever brings denunciations of imperialism.

The foreign aid is one reason that the FMLN achieved an astonishing strength of over 10,000 troops by 1983, and as late as 1989 could launch a substantial attack on the capital that aimed, among other things, to assassinate the democratically elected president.

FMLN Atrocities Get No Attention

The guerrillas were nasty bastards who sought to inflict as much physical damage to the country as possible.

They started early. “Former leftist militants and guerrillas revealed” according to Crandall, “that as early as 1970, they were... initiating violent acts in what they considered a mostly urban revolution, such as bombings, killing police officers, and kidnapping...”

Their methods were brutal. In the words of one correspondent, the guerrillas handed the government propaganda victories by “attacking unarmed peasants in La Paz province, razing municipal halls in nearly 3 dozen villages, executing two town mayors and kidnapping several others.”

The guerrillas did everything they could to wreck the country. They attacked the country’s most important hydroelectric dam and destroyed electrical towers.

And they carried out truly infamous acts, although they are rarely mentioned now.

In a neighborhood called Zona Rosa in 1985, guerrillas ambushed six off-duty U.S Marines who provided security for the American embassy. They killed nine civilians and four Marines.

In 1991, a U.S. military helicopter was downed by guerrilla fire. The co-pilot died in the crash, then the FMLN executed the surviving flight mechanic and pilot.