Anything They Can Do We Can Do Better

We
know we have readers in high places, but it
still surprises us when the administrations starts considering policies
we were advocating months ago, like taking America’s talent for producing
stone cold killers and putting it to work in Iraq (see Bring
Back the Assassins). No smart bomb can be nearly as smart, and focused, and tightly
targeted, as a
trained
assassin.

Everyone knows that Rambo, and Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal, not to mention the Karate Kid and Batman, are fictional characters, but they are based on
real people. And those WWF wrestlers can really fight! Round them up
and send them all to Iraq!

No, but seriously, we produce the finest athletes and the smartest
scientists and the most cutthroat businessmen in the world, why shouldn’t
we produce the best assassins? Americans certainly do not lack in killer
instinct! We have no shortage of fanatics ready to dedicate years of
their lives living in Himalayan monasteries, studying obscure martial disciplines and mastering the tricks
of the assassin trade.  Put them to work. Targeted assassination
is so much less messy and random than 1000-lb. high
explosive lightning bolts cast down from the heavens.

NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option
that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s
battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in
the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran
rebels,
the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces
that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down
and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces
teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely
hand-picked
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents
and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according
to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear,
however,
whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations,
in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.
The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations
in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by
Iraqi
paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

from Newsweek, via MSNBC