Iraqi Phoenix Program?
On Friday Donald Rumsfeld paid a surprise visit to Iraq, where, among other things, he watched Iraqi military and police forces being trained in commando raiding, sniping, hostage rescue and other counterinsurgency tactics.
According to the New York Times account of Rumsfeld's visit,
American forces are rushing to establish Iraqi forces in an effort some officers call the Phoenix program, since the Iraqi Army is being built essentially from scratch after the former top American civilian administrator here, L. Paul Bremer III, ordered the army disbanded in one of his first decrees in 2003.
Now to call this program the "Phoenix" program certainly does capture the sense that we are rebuilding Iraqi forces from the "ashes" of the previous army disbanded by Bremer.
However, the "since" clause in the passage above obscures the historical meaning of calling it the "Phoenix" program. It cannot but recall the program of the same name employed in Vietnam to train South Vietnamese in similar counterinsurgency tactics.
The Phoenix Program was considered not only a failure on its own terms (an effort to "Vietnamize" the war effort by enabling the South Vietnamese government to stamp down the insurgency) but, more importantly, a moral disaster. The program produced out-of-control terrorist death squads similar to those witnessed in Central America in the 1980's (and supported by John Negroponte -- then our ambassador to Honduras and now our ambassador to Iraq), who assassinated thousands (many of whom were innocent civilians) on the basis of faulty intelligence and political slander, and with utter disregard for human rights.
As Phoenix Program officer Bart Osbourne said in Congressional testimony in 1971:
I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters. ... It [Phoenix] became a sterile depersonalized murder program... Equal to Nazi atrocities, the horrors of "Phoenix" must be studied to be believed.
So the question to ask is, given that American military officers are calling the Iraqi training program the "Phoenix" program, do they mean to endorse the same tactics and same opportunism as the Vietnamese program of the same name?
2:11:06 PM 
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