Vietnam's (meager) resources

[Charles Brown]

I don't want to propose an unwarranted compromise, but couldn't the purposes of the war be both "political" and "economic" ? Why did the U.S. fight the Korean war ?  Couldn't it have sought to establish a neo-colony such as  South Korea has turned out to be ?  But not only did they want Korea to be a neo-colony with resources and workers to be exploited, but that it not be an alternative that the rest of the future "Asian tigers" might follow, not be a second revolution starting a trend at the time of a growing number of communist countries. Viet Nam was conceived in this context partly. Couldn't the U.S. want to exploit VN's resources and people, and stop its example for other countries ? VN could have been one of the future "tigers".

Charles Brown 


>>> Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> 06/02 12:57 PM >>>
I always toyed with the idea that we fought in Vietnam because we had so
little at stake.  If we were willing to fight so hard there, just imagine what
would happen to someone where we had strategic investments.

In the film, Burn, mentioned a few days ago, the British destroyed their "own"
island to prove a point.  In the same sense, Vietnam may have been a
"demonstration project" to prove our resolve to fight communism.

Doug Henwood wrote:


> Why is it so hard to believe that the U.S. really *was* fighting Communism
> in Vietnam? Why do we have to assume the war really was over some precious
> natural resource? The domino effect may have been ludicrous in strictly
> military terms, but if the U.S. hadn't spent the last 50 years destroying
> socialist and nationalist revolutions (and the USSR), the world would be a
> very different place.
>
> Doug

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 916-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu