Web Letters: Meet the New Dr. Strangelove

There is no such thing as a "good war"! There may be good reasons, such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 for war, but there is no such thing as a "good war"! War is fraught with unforeseen consequences, and it may sometimes be necessary, but it is not optional. If it is optional, it is not necessary! Only an idiot would think they have a one-size-fits-all plan for every war. Only a complete fool would advocate a prolonged worldwide insurgency with all kinds of unforeseen consequences. The first line of defense is diplomacy, and the last line of defense is war. Most of our problems in the world can be solved through diplomacy and not threats! Beware of people with grand plans. Grand plans produce grand failures!

Pervis J. Casey

Riverside, CA

I am not supporting Mr. Obama because I believe he will escape the traps of power but because he will not head for them with dionysian fervor, as did Johnson, Nixon, George W. Bush.

We will, Mr. Hayden, have Mr. Obama to kick around about all of our usual issues, but he is likely to remain our guy making the usual mistakes instead of their guy who belongs in a dock at The Hague.

Let's agree to tell him if his shoelaces are untied, and threaten to rip him up pretty good if he signs on to any of his predecessors' cruel and much too usual crackpot ideas.

And let us not forget this is The United States, an imperial monster which was and may remain a new thing in the world, and not a good thing, and one whose actions and atrocities may have a will-less life of their own. Holding power in a beast such as this may make a man, or a woman, merely the eyes of the dragon.

I, for one, would rather have Mr. Debs to vote for.

Barry Blitstein

New York City, NY

Hayden was right and wrong about the fate of the Phoenix Program; yes, the program was investgated by Congress, but Phoenix was still around when the NVA took Saigon in 1975. By that point Phoenix (which was orignially known as Cong Tac 4 and created in 1967 by Vietnamese Police General Loan, who was famously photographed in plain clothes shooting an alleged VC agent during the Tet offensive) was known as the "Special Police Investgation Service" and mostly a South Vietnamese affair, though there was an US Air Force officer overseeing the program. You have to understand that Phoenix was a system to coordinate information tortured out of people in the fifty or so "Province Interrogation Centers" and to give the "Province Reconessance Units" (goon squads made up of criminals and South Vietnamese police) names to pick up. The "real" enemies were sent to a "National Interrogation Center" located in the Saigon Naval Shipyard, and many people wond up in small cages on Con Son Island.

Phoenix never worked as a way of hitting the leadership of the NLF (popularly known as "Viet Cong"), but it was very useful in extorting money out of people and destroying political parties the various South Vienamese dictators did not like (such as the Can Lao and the Vietnamese Kuomintang). A program like it in Iraq (and there are elements of Phoenix there already, such as the Interior Ministry death squads) would go the same way, and probably make the Iraqi govenment collapse faster. In short, Phung Hoang (as the program was known in Vietnamese) is a model of how not to do a counterinsurgency.

Jake Christie

San Diego, CA