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El Salvador: Tet II
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17249 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
2,957 Words |
| Author
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F. Andy Messing, Jr.
F. Andy Messing, Jr., is executive director of the National
Defense Council Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. |
El Salvador is a land of extremes: unbelievable beauty and horrible ugliness, the very rich and the sickly poor, the powerful and the helpless. Understanding the country's historic and cultural aspects gives clues to the present conflict.
In fact, the current upsurge in military action in El Salvador was predicted in detail a year ago. In an op-ed article for the Los Angles Times dated January 29,1989, Allen B. Hazlewood, a senior fellow from the National Defense Council Foundation, accurately outlined the events that have happened since the start of the latest guerrilla offensive on November 11.
Hazlewood's observations and calculations result from several factors. His experience in Indochina as a Marine infantryman and later as a U. S. Army Special Forces adviser helped, but 14 years in Central and South America as a Special Forces adviser (7 years in El Salvador) were major factor in his foresight. Another key factor was that he examined the conflict in a multidimensional way, using formulas developed by Sun Tzu and the late Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale. To both these men, warfare was complex and the killing of the adversary not the sole objective. Sun Tzu's premise was that "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." Lansdale realized during his efforts to defeat communist guerrillas in the Philippines in the late1940s and early 1950s that "taking the cause away from the guerrillas was the essence of a counter-insurgency action." The merging of these concepts produces a comprehensive strategy that negates the "body-count" theory often applied to low-intensity conflict scenarios.
Two of the
... (1995 of 18371 Characters)
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