Vietnam’s Phoenix rises in Iraq, Nikolaj Nielsen

Nikolaj Nielsen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:33:29 +0000

The top US counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, advocated a plan based on the secretive "global Phoenix program" used in Vietnam. The CIA-operated "global Phoenix program" is known to have used widespread torture techniques. The plan called for the transfer of power and the training of South Vietnamese police whose brutality cost the lives of over 20,000 Vietnamese. Phoenix was primarily concerned with detaining, capturing, and eliminating citizens suspected of supporting the North Vietnamese. Kilcullen, who dismisses the widespread use of torture under US watch in Vietnam as a "popular myth", claims Phoenix was a program that advanced development and civil society. He also claims a similar plan for Iraq is necessary to stabilise Iraqi society. Kilcullen was Gen. David Petraeus' chief advisor on the 2007 US "troop surge" that sent in five brigades to Iraq.

The toD verdict: Next week, the US occupation of Iraq will be five years in the running. The country is still suffering from widespread violence and insecurity. Despite the proclaimed success of the "surge" partly orchestrated by Kilcullen, well over one hundred Iraqi civilians were victims of bomb blasts in February alone. Kilcullen, who describes the war against terror as the "new Cold War", is a revelation to the widening reality gap between Washington bureaucrats and ordinary Iraqi citizens yearning for security. In the Sunni district of Khadra in West Baghdad, Um Saad, a middle-aged woman who lost her two sons and her husband, firmly blames her misery on the Americans. Indeed, Kilcullen's reliance on analogies and tactics employed in Vietnam is perhaps an indication of an administration unable and unwilling to adapt a strategy uniquely suited to Iraq's quagmire. Perhaps just as disconcerting is President George Bush's open approval of CIA torture techniques. These indices spell a bleak future for the likes of Um Saad and other Iraqi citizens who will be at the mercy of greater repression and condoned CIA torture techniques reminiscent of the notorious Phoenix.

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Vietnam’s Phoenix rises in Iraq, Nikolaj Nielsen