[R-G] Reviving Vietnam War Tactics

[Anthony Fenton]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/hayden
Reviving Vietnam War Tactics

by TOM HAYDEN

[posted online on March 13, 2008]

The top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq  
advocates practicing a "global Phoenix Program," alluding to the  
notorious Vietnam-era CIA operation that provoked a worldwide uproar  
because of the detention, torture and execution of thousands of  
Vietnamese.

The mainstream media has never reported on the use of the "global  
Phoenix program" in Iraq, perhaps because the explosive terminology  
has largely disappeared from the writings and résumé of Lt. Col. David  
Kilcullen after he first being referred to it in a forty-eight-page  
strategy paper, "Countering Global Insurgency" published in the  
obscure Small Wars Journal in September-November 2004.

Kilcullen, an Australian PhD who served for twenty-one years in the  
Australian army, was the "chief adviser on counterinsurgency  
operations" to Petraeus in planning the 2007 US troop surge. He also  
served as chief strategist in the State Department's counterterrorism  
office in 2005 and 2006, and has been employed in Iraq, Pakistan,  
Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.

In the section titled "A Global Phoenix Program" in his 2004 article,  
Kilcullen describes the Vietnam Phoenix program as "unfairly maligned"  
and "highly effective." Dismissing CIA sponsorship and torture  
allegations as "popular mythology," Kilcullen calls Phoenix a  
misunderstood "civilian aid and development program" that was  
supported by "pacification" operations to disrupt the Vietcong, whose  
infrastructure ruled vast swaths of rural South Vietnam. A "global  
Phoenix program," he wrote, would provide a starting point for  
dismantling the worldwide jihadist infrastructure today.

Phoenix was far from an "aid and development" program. To achieve  
deniability, the CIA trained and transferred operational authority to  
the South Vietnamese national police, who tortured suspects  
indiscriminately. CIA officer William Colby, founder of the program,  
told a Congressional committee in 1971 that the Phoenix operation had  
killed 20,587 Vietcong suspects in two years. An official Pentagon  
evaluation in 1968 found that "the truncheon and electric shock method  
of interrogation were in widespread use, with almost all [US] advisors  
admitting to have witnessed instances of the use of these methods... 
[and] 'turned their backs on them.' " A Naval Institute historian  
later found that "the large majority of South Vietnamese interrogators  
tortured some or all of the communist prisoners in their care" as well  
as Vietnamese suspected of collaboration with the Vietcong.

According to recently disclosed documents, Colby went to laughable  
lengths in trying to cover up the real nature of Phoenix. Lloyd  
Shearer, editor of Parade, wrote Colby in 1972 "wondering if you would  
care to say flatly that the CIA has never used political assassination  
in Indo-China or elsewhere and has never induced, employed or  
suggested to others that such tactics or devices be employed," adding  
that he would "tango with Dick Helms in Garfinkel's largest show  
window" if proven wrong. The documents I received from the CIA last  
year include no less than nine drafts of Colby's reply to Shearer,  
including handwritten revisions. One top CIA official wrote, "I  
suggest we let the whole thing drop" on an official routing slip.  
Another, Angus Thuermer, recommended against saying that Vietcong were  
killed while resisting police arrest, as follows: "'resisting police  
arrest'" will get you, with the press, nothing but snide snicking  
cracks.... and as we're really not going to win too much in a short  
letter anyway, why not skip the 'occasional abuses' bit."

"Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort" was the Washington Post  
headline for a 2007 article on Kilkullen and others. The history of  
university-based counterinsurgency operatives stretches back to the  
Michigan State University Vietnam project in the 1950s, which involved  
covert CIA officers training and arming South Vietnamese police.  
Stanley Sheinbaum, for decades a respected progressive leader and  
fundraiser, coordinated the MSU project and later, in disgust, broke  
the story to Ramparts magazine (April 1966). Nearly fifty years later,  
Gen. Petraeus is still recruiting academic anthropologists and systems  
theorists. Among them are professors at Harvard's Carr Center, which  
formally collaborated with him in writing the current Army and  
Marines' war-fighting manuals. According to a 2005 New Yorker report,  
American psychologists and psychiatrists are enlisted in Behavioral  
Science Consultation Teams to design strategies to "exploit the  
physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees." Anthropologists are  
recruited to study tribal cultural patterns in what Kilcullen calls  
"armed social science."

Carefully disguised programs that use American funding and training to  
employ local police in torture, death squads and mass detention had  
continued under US sponsorship in Vietnam, the Shah's Iran and Central  
America before taking root in Iraq and Afghanistan. The torture  
revelations at Abu Ghraib prison came to public attention only through  
photographs posted on the web, and the official spin was that the  
abuses were the irresponsible behavior of an isolated few.

The evidence continues to mount that torture is being practiced in  
Iraq. One of Petraeus's top associates, Col. Theodore Westhusing,  
committed suicide in June 2005, leaving a note saying, "I cannot  
support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuses and  
liars." The Jones Commission reported to Congress last year that the  
Iraqi national police are "highly sectarian," almost entirely Shi'a,  
and should be disbanded. The New York Times has reported that there  
are as many as ten secret prisons under the Interior Ministry in  
Baghdad. The Los Angeles Times has described the same ministry, funded  
and advised by Americans, as responsible for torture and ethnic  
cleansing. A BBC reporter in 2006 showed footage of tortured civilians  
and said "it's all happening under the eyes of US commanders who seem  
unwilling or unable to intervene." In a July 2007 report to Congress,  
even the Bush Administration acknowledged that "target lists,"  
emanating from the highest levels of the Iraqi regime, contain the  
names of Iraqis that are suspected of sympathizing with the  
insurgency. Baghdad has been turned into an urban counterinsurgency  
theme park with blast walls, barricades, concertina wire, checkpoints,  
interrogation centers, retina scans and fingerprinting, door-to-door  
searches--the whole panorama of police controls. The Pentagon refers  
to these areas as "gated communities."

Kilkullen sees the problem in terms of a biological model of disease  
control. In a flattering 2007 New Yorker interview with George Packer,  
he compared the US military surge to extending the use of antibiotics  
after the disease is apparently suppressed: "you keep taking it as  
long as possible, even after the symptoms are gone, to kill the  
underlying infection."

Now in his 80s, Sheinbaum shakes his head about such analogies. As he  
wrote in 1966 in Ramparts, "Where is the source of serious  
intellectual criticism that would help us avoid future Vietnams?...  
Our failure in Vietnam was not one of technical expertise, but of  
historical wisdom."