The Drying of the Blood
It is further instructive to note here that the "sideshow" of Cambodia was more recently placed into startling context both in respect of the Vietnam disaster and in relation to what's happening now in Syria and Iraq with ISIS/ISIL. In a recent essay, John Pilger, veteran Australian journalist, filmmaker and perennial thorn in the side of the demonic hegemons of the Anglo-American power elites, offered a persuasive -- indeed, irresistible -- comparative analysis of the rise of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge rabble with that of the ISIS "rabble". The only significant difference seemed to be that the Khmer Rouge weren't actually armed, funded and trained by the Americans! They were much more a 'home-grown', grassroots entity.
And in his op-ed piece, Pilger as usual doesn't pull any punches:
""[t]he Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century". Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft". Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry."
Notwithstanding the terror, horror and tragedy of Cambodia, insofar as America's boots on the ground involvement was concerned, it was after all a war whose epicentre was and remained Vietnam. For its part, Valentine's book catalogues an altogether different face of the Vietnam reality, although no less merciless, brutal and shocking than the one Nick Turse showcases (see Part One).
Interestingly, the book was unavailable for quite some time and was recently republished as part of Open Road Media's Forbidden Bookshelf program. And after reading 'Phoenix', it becomes clear why successive US governments, the CIA, the US State Department and the Pentagon especially did not want this story ever to see the light of day; this was presumably because it might have given too many people a real insight into what the US is capable of when it puts its mind to it and what may be happening behind the scenes now in various hotspots of the world where the US has a stake, a point to which we'll return towards the end.
Said to be the brainchild of William Colby, a high level officer at the CIA station in Saigon during the late 60s and early 70s who later became the CIA director in 1973, Phoenix was nothing less than a systematic assassination, terrorism, kidnapping, psyops and torture program, planned and orchestrated from start to finish. Between 1965 and 1972 then, an estimated eighty thousand civilians were "pacified" or "neutralized" under the program.
All up, very few subjected to the mortal vicissitudes of Phoenix rose from the ashes of destruction it unleashed, so much so one wonders if there was not some dark, macabre intentional irony at play with those who conceived of and named this diabolical, Geneva Convention defying exercise in 'winning hearts and minds'.
The Lord Giveth and the M-16 Taketh Away
In short, it is difficult to see how what happened with Phoenix as being anything different from what the Islamic State is apparently perpetrating in Syria and Iraq. I suspect that Phoenix represents even now something far, far more insidious than anything the various ISIS factions could ever hope to achieve. Here's a sampler:
"[Phoenix] was".an instrument of counter-terror -- the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy."
By 1973, by some accounts the program had generated some 300,000 political prisoners in South Vietnam. On the flimsiest of pretexts, men, women and even children alike were subjected by CIA operatives and special forces and their specially trained South Vietnamese cadres to indefinite incarceration without trial, inhuman psychological and physical torture, sadistically vicious rape, genital mutilation, and in countless cases, summary execution. As relentlessly brutal as the grunts portrayed in Turse's book were, in Valentine's narrative The Company's operatives and their cohort were no less so.
Much in the same way that anyone familiar with NATO's and the CIA's infamous Operation Gladio in Europe would I suspect appreciate, for those who do read Valentine's book, the next time you hear any official from the USG, the CIA, the US Military or NATO for that matter talking about "terrorism" or "terrorist groups" or "vicious Jihadists", "sadistic", "nihilistic" Islamists, you may find it hard to take them seriously or understand how they can do so and keep a straight face. As we have seen more recently, when it comes to maintaining, or for that matter expanding, the American 'Caliphate', the prevailing mindset of the US National Security State for its part is no stranger to 'jihad', it being a particularly unwavering, peculiarly righteous brand thereof.
Yet that "jihad" has a long, bloody and sorry history to be sure. Despite being an unmitigated foreign policy and military disaster, Vietnam it could be safely argued was the 'model' proving ground, an imperial experiment that although a failure on every measurable level, did nothing it appears to deter the demonic hegemons of the US National Security State then and now from pushing the envelope as far as they could for as long as they could. It provides us with "perspective" in spades and shovels, at least for those folks looking anyway!
Put simply it is difficult to walk away from either of these books -- and the whole Vietnam experience in general -- and not reflect on America's place in the world, both in the context of what was happening then, and with respect to what is happening now.
The perspective alone should stop most in their tracks, with or without the context. In the process of ostensibly defending and preserving freedom, democracy, liberty, equality, human rights and the rule of law, and upholding the principles of its fabled Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all the fruit that notionally comes on the platter, America had to -- paraphrased herein from the reportage of noted Vietnam era journalist Peter Arnett -- destroy the 'village' in order to save it.
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