Meet the New Dr. Strangelove

by Tom Hayden

In the depths of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick created a notoriously-mad scientist character, Dr. Strangelove, whose passion was for dropping atomic bombs. Now there is a rising media and Beltway fascination with a new Dr. Strangelove, whose passion is imposing a mad science of counterinsurgency on Iraq.

His name is David Kilcullen, an Australian academic and military veteran whom the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks once described as Gen. David Petraeus’ “chief adviser” on the counterinsurgency doctrine underlying the surge in Iraq.

Kilcullen advocated a “global Phoenix program” in an obscure military journal, Small Wars, in 2004. For the ahistorical or uninitiated, Phoenix was a largely off-the-books detention, torture and assassination program aimed at tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who were identified by informants as the Vietcong’s “civilian infrastructure.” The venture was so discredited that the US Congress denounced and disbanded it after hearings in the 1970s.