You read the title correctly -
it's not your imagination. I'm surprised this hasn't come up on DKos, given Kos' own ties to El Salvador...
Iraq can learn from the recent history of El Salvador, a country wracked by civil war that has developed into a stable democracy and close U.S. ally, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. [...]
From 1979 to 1992, El Salvador suffered a bloody civil war with leftist guerillas that left 75,000 dead in this nation of 6.5 million, where half live in poverty.
El Salvador's wartime experience may be lost on most Americans who only remember that El Salvador was that thing where Oliver North got into trouble. But it's not lost on me - I served in Central America back then, and I'll just say for my part that my memories of the experience are much less fond than Secretary Rumsfeld's.
More after the jump...
I won't bore you with stories about atrocities that happened in Central America back then, but it's instructive to mention that John Negroponte, the current Ambassador to Iraq, was once Ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan years... and he's got plenty of blood on his hands from those days.
Anyway, let me give you some perspective here. El Salvador's losing 75,000 people would be like Iraq having 280,000 civilians killed (and as many as 100,000 civilians have died there already btw)... or to make it even more personal, like the USA having roughly 3.1 million of its own people killed today. To spell it out even more for you, that would be like having a 9/11 scale tragedy in America each and every week for about 14 years... or wiping out the entire population of Chicago (or Houston, or the entire state of Oklahoma, or Oregon...).
Like I said, nobody wants Iraq to follow the Salvadoran path to democracy.
The article goes on to say that Rumsfeld will also be visiting Nicaragua and Panama, two countries that once had troops in Iraq but have since brought them back. So I guess he'll be dropping a horse's heads into a couple of beds on the way back from the Quito conference.