I recently bought this book and immediately began to read it. Douglas Valentine has been writing about the CIA's role in counterinsurgency for many years. That word, to be properly understood though, needs much more definition.
Valentine undertook a detailed study and analysis of the CIA's 'Phoenix' program of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. He interviewed many of the key players who created and directed Phoenix. Then Valentine took what he learned from the Vietnam program and shows how it has been refined and implemented in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and more recently in Ukraine. He illustrates how the mainstream media plays its role in furthering CIA lies and ensuring a docile American public.
Here are a few illustrative bits from the book:
This [American] ruling class within the National Security Establishment, represented most perfectly by Hillary Clinton, knows that its enemies, foreign and domestic, must be suppressed ideologically as well as militarily. Thus they have embraced the Phoenix concept of employing implicit and explicit terror to control, organize and pacify societies.
The success of the Phoenix doctrine is most evident in the ability of its advocates in the ruling class to corrupt Congress and force it to divert massive amounts of public money into the militarization of foreign and domestic policy.
Now that the corrupt and corrupting Phoenix institutional structure is firmly in place in America, it is only a matter of time until we enter the next Phoenix phase of explicit terror here at home.
The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.
The CIA was protecting the major opium producers in the Golden Triangle [during the Vietnam War], just like they've been protecting the major drug dealers in Afghanistan for the last fifteen years. They were funneling heroin and opium to their warlords in South Vietnam as a payoff for advancing the US policies that were detrimental to their own country.
The truth about US wars is less about combating Islamic terrorism or 'protecting the homeland' than it is about the dark side of the American psyche, rooted in slavery and the genocidal conquest of a continent. For American businessmen, the global War on Terror with its relentless bombing campaigns and extra-legal methods shrouded in official secrecy, translates into big profits.
The Afghan people hate the Americans more and more, year after year. And that makes the CIA happy, in so far as it spells protracted war and increased profits for its sponsors in the arms industry.
Afghan anger means more resistance. And more resistance provides a neat pretext for the eternal military occupation of a disposable nation strategically located near Russia, [Iran] and China.
But it also means spiritual defeat for America, as it descends ever further into the black hole of self-deception, militarism and covert operations.
Valentine names the names of those who developed this global counterinsurgency operation. He also names some of the 'progressive' activists and alternative media that play ball with the ruling oligarchy here at home by taking money to run their operations.
The book is endorsed by highly respected figures like NSA whistleblower John Kiriakou, academic Peter Dale Scott who came up with the tag 'deep state' and the truth-telling Robert Parry at Consortium News (which happens to be one of my favorite sources for news and analysis).
If you want to see the big picture of US empire, understand how it works, understand who many of the insiders are (or have been), and get a glimpse into what is coming to America in the near future - then I highly recommend this book.
Bruce
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