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
>