[lbo-talk] The end of warfare?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Dec 21 10:56:34 PST 2004


joanna bujes wrote:
>
> Viet Nam: to stop the spread of communism.

Not really; to put it this way too readily accepts cold-war rhetoric. It was not "communism" so much as "third-world independence, communist or otherwise" that the war aimed to crush. And as several have pointed out, the war was quite successful in that respect. Of course the u.s. hoped to "win" in movie-terms as well, but it was the crushing of Vietnam as an example that was vital. Most of the u.s. interventions after ww2 were not to stop communism but such independence: Santo Domingo, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Guatemala -- and in fact, Cuba. Cuba was not socialist or even threatening to be when the u.s. _began_ its interventions there.
>
> Iraq: to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East and
> to destroy the possiblity of secular democracy in the region.

This is a reasonable speculation, but we don't _know_. We really don't. Motives here are a tangle. And in any case, the genocidal program Clinton had set in motion was achieving both of these results very nicely. So if these are/were the motives, then the war is a sheer redundancy.

Carrol


>
> Joanna
>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list