RAINING ON THE “DEATH SQUAD” PARADE: David Adesnik dissects the story that had some of the more excitable sectors of the blogosphere excited. So does Greg Djerejian and — interestingly, defending Rumsfeld in the process — Matthew Yglesias.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Jonah Goldberg:

Okay now, let’s clear a few things up. First of all, the “El Salvador Option” was used in — hold on, let me get my map, yes, yes, that’s right — El Salvador, not Nicaragua. Whatever the merits or demerits of American policy in El Salvador or Nicaragua, the effort in El Salvador did not lead to the Iran-Contra scandal. Newsweek seems to think that piling on negative associations with Latin American foreign policy will help dramatize a story they might not even have in the first place. After all, the substance of the initial story is that people inside the Pentagon are discussing their options. Someone reorder my adult diapers, that is scary!

What is particularly piquant — that’s right I used the word piquant — about the conflation of Nicaragua and El Salvador is that it suggests America’s entire effort “down there” was nothing but folly, hubris, and imperialism. That is, after all, what the Left believed at the time and still believes today. That’s fine, I suppose, but it should help remind all of us that the Cold War was not exactly an issue that received a lot of bipartisan consensus in the 1980s, despite the efforts of liberals today to pretend otherwise. We’ve heard a lot from liberals in recent months about how the Cold War was marked by a consensus across the ideological spectrum and how George Bush’s greatest failure is not pursuing a similar consensus on the war on terror. All of this is ahistorical and dishonest twaddle. . . .

What united opponents of American policy in Central America was a vague sense that we were on the wrong side. They tittered at Reagan’s declaration that the Contras were freedom fighters. They made movies that turned the leftists into the good guys in El Salvador. John Kerry, Pat Leahy, Tom Harkin, and other titans of international statesmanship actively worked against American foreign policy. “I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do,” Kerry said about American relations with the Soviet client Sandanista regime. He lent his name to support groups aiding the Communist-controlled regions of El Salvador.

I have no doubt that opposition to the “death squads” was also based on revulsion at some of their excesses. But there can be no doubt that they were also vexed that we were fighting Communists at all. Moreover, our special forces were not sent to El Salvador to train anybody to murder people. They were sent to help stop the widespread civil chaos and murder being perpetrated by others. They largely succeeded.

He continues in the same vein, which makes me wonder if making comparisons to Central America will help the Left, or simply bring up a lot of things that a lot of people would rather gloss over today.