Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy

* Independent:

"This (Iraq) is a shadowy struggle, which involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, murder victims mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been "disappeared".
[]
Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions". The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the "Salvador Option" after the American-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless instances of human rights abuse."

* driftglass:

"Somewhere in my deepest and more proudly paranoid recesses I envision a Liberal Master Cylinder -- like Commander Kos but oh so much higher up the food chain -- studying the morally-flatlining pod people the Right has been breeding for the last 30 years and deciding to go Full Metal John Galt on their granite, Christalopithecan skulls.

“Let them have it all,” the Progressive John Galt of my imagination sayeth. “Just step out of their way. Let them win and then let them wallow in the Hell their winning will create.”

Because perhaps in the end there was no way to break the Moderates of their lethal delusions but to play Clarence the Angel and let them see what the world would be like if Conservatives were actually forced to step up, shut the fuck up and govern.

To stop bitching and whining and Rushing and Gingriching about how glorious things would be if we had no Federal government.

If we ran the country as a White Christian fiefdom.

If we unilaterally voided the social contract.

If we deregulated corporations wholesale.

If we elevated torture to national policy, spied on our own citizens without warrants, and fed habeas corpus into the wood chipper.

If we and openly used our military as the meat-axe of Empire to eviscerate anyone who made us nervous and conquer anyone who sat on any natural resources our Ruling Clique wanted to exploit.

In other words, if we let the Christopaths actually run the joint and live with the fallout.

Because the blight and fear and debt and death all around us in the Year of Our Lord 2006 are not what happens in spite of Conservativism, but the apotheosis of Conservativism.

And what this bitter lesson has taught us is simply this: We cannot allow thuggish children whose vision of our future is grounded in a truculent and superstitious pseudo-religion and a proudly imbecilic ignorance of science, history, economics, world affairs and basic English to run the country.

Ever again."