Reviving Vietnam War Tactics

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. More