To: stockman_scott who wrote (122796 ) 1/4/2004 11:39:32 PM From: GST Read Replies (1) | Respond to Thank you -- what an excellent post: <This boyish adventure side of counterinsurgency died on the battlefields of Vietnam. As the war ground on, the Americans started echoing the harsher tactics of the Viet Cong, particularly the targeting of enemy collaborators for assassination. In the infamous Phoenix Program that began in 1967, a direct outgrowth of counterinsurgency, the American government paid for the murder of thousands of civilians allegedly tied to the Viet Cong. This was precisely the type of program that turned many Americans against the Vietnam War (though US-backed military forces went on to use similarly bloody techniques elsewhere, notably in Guatemala). Writing in The New Yorker recently, Seymour Hersh worried that the ''preemptive manhunting'' of insurgents in Iraq may replicate the horrors of the Phoenix Program.
