Two disturbing pieces from this week’s Sunday Times:

Frank Rich on how easily the Abu Ghraib atrocities have vanished from our TV screens, and

Andrew Sullivan‘s review of two books on the scandal.

Both are worth reading, but Sullivan’s piece is especially wrenching. It’s a review, but less of the two books in question than of U.S. policy on torture — and Sullivan’s own vocal support for the war. He’s reluctant to claim, as some have, that Bush and Rumsfeld were knowingly complicit in the torture that took place at Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere). But far from leaving Bush off the hook,

… decisions made by the president himself and the secretary of defense contributed to confusion, vagueness and disarray, which, in turn, led directly to abuse and torture…. And the damage done was intensified by President Bush’s refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president’s response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, ”Get off his back.” In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded.

Further on, he wonders about his own culpability:

Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we na?Øve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ”evil” might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

And finally, that of the American political system:

Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ”heroic” protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.

These two articles cap off a week where we learned the Pentagon is considering the chillingly-named “Salvador option” — a throwback to the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration covertly funded right-wing death squads in El Salvador to crush a left-wing insurgency. The targets weren’t just military; dissidents, political opponents and civilians were abducted, tortured or assassinated in a campaign of terror.

The idea would be to transplant the tactic a few thousand miles east, funding similar paramilitary groups in Iraq to bring the same kind of terror to the country’s Sunni population:

One military source involved in the Pentagon debate… suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

Arguably, “Salvador option” is the wrong term for this kind of hideous idea. Cast your mind back fifteen years earlier to Vietnam in the late 1960s, when the U.S. launched the Phoenix Program — a campaign that targeted noncombatants supporting the Viet Cong. Entire villages were rounded up and interrogated, with torture and killings among the accepted tactics.

Nearly forty years later, those methods are again on the table. And so the question must haunt any of the war’s conscientious supporters: in conjuring these horrors once more, will the Bush administration have defeated Saddam’s legacy, or replicated it?