A couple of weeks ago Noam Chomsky, whose works need no introduction from me, addressed a conference co-sponsored by the Pacific Green Party in Portland. He spoke about a variety of topics, and ranged across the world: but he spoke of something close to my heart when he analyzed the American War in Vietnam.

According to Chomsky, clarity about the causes and the outcome of the Vietnam War is “highly important” to the situation in which we find ourselves today; not least because of active efforts by the corporate elite which directs the political fortunes of the United States to revise history into a romance hardly recognizable to those who lived through it.

I lived through that war of choice, that aggressive war against a country which was no threat to the United States, a war begun under a Democratic President, continued under his successor, and broadened and made even more brutal by the Republican President who signed a truce agreement that ended active American involvement. I spent two years in federal penitentiary, refusing the draft, during that invasion and bombardment of South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. As we today do the same to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and possibly Iran, I found myself struck with the insight Chomsky offered on this nation’s foreign policy choices of forty years ago.

The stable socialist economy of North Vietnam, Chomsky offered, generated concern among American policy makers that it might spread a “virus” of “successful economic development outside the reach of American power.” It was not and never had been the case that the government of Vietnam was in the hands of puppets of Chinese Communism: despite the propaganda mills of the day, it had as much truth as the fabulous nuclear weapons somewhere in Iraq being assembled by Saddam Hussein, preparing to give us all “a wake-up call in the form of a mushroom cloud,” in the words of the later Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice. Rather, Chomsky said, if the Vietnamese government could unify the country and pursue economic development outside the reach of US corporate interests, that model would have obvious attractions for the Phillippines, which had a low-grade insurrectionary movement, and for Indonesia, with its large and powerful Communist party, as well as for other East Asian nations. Imagine if Japan began to provide the technological leadership for such a regional network, suggested Chomsky.

It so happens that my older brother Paul was in the US State department during those years, and I, an undergraduate college student, had the opportunity to discuss the US policy toward Indonesia in 1965, with a senior State Department official, one grade below ambassador, at a family gathering. “We are holding our breath and gambling,” I recall this gentleman stating, “on the Indonesian generals” — the ones who that year staged a coup d’etat in which they overthrew a nationalist president and massacred upwards of four hundred thousand purported Communists.

As a consequence of US foreign policy during the Vietnam War, Chomsky declared, Vietnam was destroyed and vicious dictatorships, hostile to autonomous social and economic development, were installed in all the neighboring countries: Indonesia most prominently, but also Cambodia, the Phillippines, and Korea as well. Chomsky quoted McGeorge Bundy, a principal architect of the decade-long Vietnam War, recalling in his memoirs that with the coup and massacre in Indonesia, the United States could have ended its direct involvement in Vietnam in 1965. Once the principal aim had been accomplished, Chomsky concluded, there was no need to pour more blood and treasure into a specific theater, just to hammer home the message of American imperial supremacy.

I myself marched against the Vietnam War in 1968 and 1969; I was in jail in 1970 and 1971; yet its aim had been achieved already in 1965, regardless of the superficial score of dead bodies and blasted lives which followed. I had to ask myself, Was it all in vain?

By no means, Chomsky continued. In the face of widespread popular opposition to the violent tactics of 1961-1973 the United States has had to modify it tactics in maintaining imperial supremacy. When in January 1968 Lyndon Baines Johnson inquired about reinforcing the more than 200,000 troops in Vietnam with another 200,000, the Joint Chiefs of Staff apposed the request, saying significant reserves of troops were needed for domestic duty, for possible control of crowds in urban unrest. The repressive efforts of the corporate elite in charge of political institutional power have been less successful after the Vietnam episode than they had been before it: the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental and anit-nuclear movements, to name but four, have established a permanent presence for a more humane society.

Thus far Chomsky. As for me, I am both heartened and in a certain degree inspired by the context into which the leading living public intellectual placed one of the major political struggles of my lifetime: into a comparative, clear-sighted international perspective, free of cant and rhetorical flourish. As in the war in Southeast Asia four decades ago, so in West and Central Asia today, this country destroys those regimes which threaten, not its political or military security — the charges were as risible in the case of Vietnam as they were with respect to Iraq, or are now with respect to Iran — but those which threaten to conduct autonomous economic development outside the sphere of access by American corporate interests. Afghanistan under the Taliban destroyed 98 percent of the opium crop, now restored to prewar levels after ‘liberation’ by US troops and bombs. Iraq under Saddam Hussaien made no secret of its plans to put the price of oil where it chose regardless of the wishes of US energy corporations.

None of this valuable insight tells us what tactics we should follow in fighting a system of exploitation that is both widespread and entrenched. Our own history as a violent aggressor nation, warring in the course of the 19th century against Native Americans, Mexicans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos, all the while seeing ourselves as the best hope of democracy on earth, indicates the magnitude of the task before us.

Still, we continue: we gain by refusing to privilege ends over means, by treating every person as of transcendent value, and by wagering on the ability of rational thought eventually to persuade. We learn from the past and apply the lessons toward building a better future.

by Michael Meo