We’re beginning to see the outlines of Bush’s military strategy in Iraq. It’s not withdrawal. Don’t kid yourself.

Bush intends to prevail.

While he may, under domestic pressure, bring 10,000 or 20,000 or even 50,000 troops home, he has no intention of ending this war.

As Seymour Hersh notes in the latest issue of The New Yorker, Bush plans on replacing a reliance on U.S. troops with a reliance on U.S. bombers.

“Departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower,” Hersh writes. “Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units.”

Already, “the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,” Hersh reports. And he cites a Pentagon press release that notes that one Marine aircraft unit alone has “dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance.”

This could lead to a much higher civilian death toll in Iraq, which is now at least 27,000, according to Iraqbodycount.net, and perhaps more than 100,000, according to the October 2004 Johns Hopkins University study published in The Lancet.

U.S. bombers could become tools of vindictive Iraqis who want to settle scores, Hersh says, since Iraqis on the ground may ultimately have the ability to call in the bombs on targets of their own choosing.

While all this will be going on from the air, on the ground, we’re likely to see more of the Salvador option: The use of death squads to abduct, torture, and kill any Sunni suspected of being part of the resistance.

“Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills,” The New York Times reports in a front-page story on November 29.

Even former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has decried these human rights abuses. “People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” he told the London Observer.

“We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated. A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations.”

Cheney and Rumsfeld have been trumpeting the Salvador option for some time now.

During the 2004 Vice Presidential debate, Dick Cheney said, “Twenty years ago, we had a similar situation in El Salvador. . . . And today, El Salvador is a whale of a lot better.”

Donald Rumsfeld said virtually the same thing right after the election. “The Iraqi people can find much to admire in El Salvador’s recent history,” Rumsfeld said in San Salvador on November 11, 2004.

Cheney and Rumsfeld implicitly were putting their seal of approval on the tens of thousands of civilians the Salvadoran death squads tortured and murdered.

Rumsfeld even invoked the murdered Salvadorans to bless the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “For millions of Salvadorans back then, peace and prosperity was little more than a distant hope,” he said in San Salvador. “In that struggle for freedom, many lives were lost. I think they would be proud to know that . . . soldiers from a peaceful and democratic El Salvador are today fighting alongside U.S. and coalition forces to help to secure freedom and prosperity for the people of Iraq.”

Bush, for his part, is so ga-ga with messianic delusions that he doesn’t care about the deaths along the way, Hersh contends. “He doesn’t feel any pain,” one former defense official told Hersh. “Bush is a believer in the adage, ‘People may suffer and die but the Church advances.’ ”

All the more reason for those of us in the peace movement to demand not only to bring the troops home, but to bring this bloody war to an immediate end.

Matthew Rothschild has been with The Progressive since 1983. His McCarthyism Watch web column has chronicled more than 150 incidents of repression since 9/11.

© 2005 The Progressive