> From: "Marvin Gandall"
> > So why do you think they spilled so much blood and treasure?
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> Because they thought a successful revolution in Vietnam would lead to
> revolutions in other SE Asian countries and maybe elsewhere as well.
>
> -- Luke
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Well then I guess we agree.
I was responding to your earlier post dismissing as a "Chomsky fantasy" that the US intervenes because it fears the "threat of a good example". I think the US does fear "examples" -- not of abstract "development models", but of actual regimes and movements which encourage the spread of political zones outside of its economic and strategic control, whether these call themselves Marxist, Islamist, or radical-nationalist. Vietnam, as you note, was a powerful inspiration to a proliferating number of guerrilla movements in the 60s, not only in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, but throughout the Third World, reflected in Che Guevara's famous call for "two, three many Vietnams." I don't think Chomsky would argue differently.
Iraq under Saddam in the 90s was a different kind of bad example, especially for the Likudniks surrounding Bush, of irridentist resistance to a Mideast peace settlement dictated by Israel and the US. The overthrow of the Baathist regime was intended to send a demoralizing message to the Palestinians and the Arab street. Since the invasion, Iraq has morphed into an even worse example of Islamist resistance to US imperialism. Hence the resistance to withdraw for fear of "encouraging further terrorism".
You suggested also that the Vietnam war "wasn't a plot to wreck the economy of a future communist state--rather, it was an idiotic plot to show that the US would oppose communist revolution with massive firepower". I'm not sure I see the distinction. This massive firepower, far from being wanton, has precisely as its objective to "wreck economies", as well as the military capacity to resist US forces.
Finally, I think it's mistaken to see the decisions to commit large numbers of US ground forces as "idiotic plots". Their outcome might make it appear that way in retrospect. But they're really miscalculations, based on imperial hubris, of the US's unchallengable ability to impose its will anywhere by overwhelming military force. And I don't think sending in the troops is the preferred option; in general, the US tries to accomplish its foreign policy objectives through economic pressure and covert subversive operations involving US advisors and agents and their surrogates (Iran, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Chile, the Congo, Indonesia, etc.) But, as Vietnam and Iraq demonstrated, this doesn't always work, and the US succumbs to the temptation to directly insert its ground forces. Alas for the planners, this invariably create a political backlash at home, particularly as the military casualties and civilian atrocities mount. The "Vietnam syndrome" seems intractable. Such are the burdens of Empire in a democratic age.
Marv Gandall