Death squads & U.S. policy.

IN DISCUSSING the business of terrorists and death squads and U.S. policy in general recently, Time magazine emphasized a solidfying U.S. consensus. It said that Vice President "Bush was in El Salvador for just seven hours, but his warnings about 'these right-wing fanatics' were stark and powerful. 'Your cause is being undermined by the murderous violence of reactionary minorities,' he said to an assembly of the country's politicians and military men, '[which] poisions the well of friendship between our countries. [Do not] make the mistake of thinking that there is any division in my country on this question.'"

Now, let us concede that the death squads are composed primarily of sadistic opportunists who, taking cover in the civil war, pursue their acquisitive and sanguinary interests relatively unmolested because of the preoccupation of civil authority with that civil war. Is it a strategically decisive problem that they are unregulated? One on which plausibly hangs the question whether we should aid the government of El Salvador?

One's instinctive feeling in the matter (perhaps I should not go so far as Mr. Bush and suggest that there is "no division in my country on the question") is that the world would be better off if a dozen Salvadoran government sharpshooters, in the middle of the night, were to visit the homes of the leaders of the death squads and, in the brisk style of Charles Bronson in the movie Death Wish, simply do away with them. To be sure, there would then be those who accused El Salvador of commissioning a Super Death Squad; but we could leave that discussion to the American Civil Liberties Union to fret over, and go to sleep a little bit more peacefully in the knowledge that the country we were sending military and economic aid to was not co-existing peacefully with squads of men who go out at night and murder missionary nuns.

But what one must guard against is the notion that our alliance with the government of El Salvador is a function of its civilized deportment.

A generation ago we joined hands with Josef Stalin, whose entire government one might charitably refer to as a death squad. He would not have welcomed any advice on how to reform Gulag; which advice, for the record, nobody in the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt felt any compulsion to tender.

Twenty years later, we begain telling President Diem in Vietnam to mend his ways sufficiently to keep Buddhist moks from immolating themselves in protest against his policies. What we ended up with, in due course, was the boat people.

A half-dozen years ago we decided we had better begin running Iranian internal affairs, and began inveighing against the (demonstrated) cruelties of the representatives of the Shah of Iran. In due course we got the Ayatollah.

Last month, the newly elected president of Argentina indicted a handful of military figures whom he will hold responsible for the six thousand desaparecidos wasted during Argentina's civil war. This grand gesture toward a historical reconciliation between Argentina and justice does not belie the chronological point, namely that at the time the Argentinian death squads were operating, either the government could not, or, if it could, it did not, impede their activity. And now Argentina is being run by a democratic government. It would be glib to suppose that that would necessarily have come about if the counter-revolutionary activities against the Montoneros, the Argentinian version of the Sandinistas, had been conducted according to rules of warfare that nowadays satisfy the refined consciences of American congressmen. Argentina is in the hands of democrats, not totalitarians. How that came to be is a subtle questions, deserving of subtle analysis.

We are in El Salvador because its government, for all its impurities, is geopolitically allied with us in the great cosmic effort, however disheveled, to give freedom and democracy and decency a chance against the Communist monolith. To suggest that United States support should be contingent on El Salvador's regulation of its grisly death squads is, simply, to miss the point; and to raise to primacy, in the formulation of foreign policy, considerations that are, simply, extrinsic to strategic U.S. concerns.