I’ve come to believe that Israel has taken a page from US actions in Vietnam and instituted a Phoenix Program to eliminate the civilian cadre of Hamas and Hezbollah.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.” The victims of the Phoenix Program were Vietnamese civilians, male and female, suspected of harboring information about Viet Cong combatants.  Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies.

Israel seems to be following the same playbook. In September, this campaign of Israeli assassinations massively escalated, as many thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers and other devices were used to kill or severely maim enormous numbers of people in Lebanon who Israel claimed were Hezbollah combatants.

Contrary to US and Israeli commentators, the targeted were not military cadre but civilians who make up the administration side of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a resistance movement that emerged out of necessity to defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression, especially during the occupation of South Lebanon. Today, Hezbollah has evolved into a multifaceted organization that encompasses political, social, and military dimensions, playing a pivotal role in safeguarding the country’s sovereignty.

As for Hezbollah’s role beyond Lebanon’s borders, Hezbollah has become a significant regional player. Its support for resistance groups across Palestine and its involvement in the global war against Syria demonstrate that Hezbollah’s role is much broader. This is not about interfering but rather about confronting a common threat. The group sees itself as part of a larger Axis of Resistance, countering U.S. and Israeli influence throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah’s significance goes beyond its military strength. It represents an ideological stance against occupation and domination, making it an indispensable part of the resistance framework in the region.

In Gaza, Israel is targeting civilian members of Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. There’s also an particularly diabolical AI targeting program called “Where’s Daddy?” that tracks any Palestinian civilian, somehow associated with Hamas, home, then bombs and kills the whole family.

As for the empire, the US never really ended the Phoenix Program, it simply evolved. Phoenix was refined in the dirty wars in Central America, where it became the Salvador Option, a program of indigenous “death squads” trained by Americans to eliminate communist insurgents and the labor leaders, social workers and Catholic ministry, preaching “Liberation Theology,” who supported them.

In Chile, after supporting General Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The Salvador Option was resurrected after a deadly Ba’athist-led insurgency derailed the US occupation of Iraq. In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in Colonel James Steele, a veteran of Central America’s dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centers, torture and death squads. A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

While eschewing large occupation forces, the US has come to rely on proxies to manage the empire, however Phoenix remains standard SOP for the empire. For example: there’s the US’s penchant for using Sunni extremists–terrorists like al Qaeda–to attack and destroy Libya and attempt to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar Assad. And, in Ukraine the use of Nazi snipers to murder Maiden protestors and Azov para-militaries to burn-alive Russian trade-unionists in Odessa in 2014.

Author of the Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine, says that the Phoenix Program has come home to the US, with the deployment of FBI Fusion Centers to track and surveil dissidents. “Only five percent of the people need to be organized in this fashion to install a fascist dictator in the United States. That is the ultimate objective of the greatest covert operation ever, the one in which the oligarchs steal everything you own.”

What’s abundantly clear is that the US empire and its murderous proxies have replaced counter-insurgency with counter-terror. Terrorizing hearts and minds has come to replace winning them over.