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By Root 2663 0

But those who are allegedly guilty of these “terrifying” crimes are given no opportunity to explain the basis for their opposition to U.S. aggression and massacre. Nor are they permitted to assign to their proper place in history those who condemn the “moral failure” of opposing U.S. aggression or those who praise themselves for their occasional twitters of protest when the cost to us became too great. We read that the opponents of the war “brandished moral principles and brushed aside complexity” but nothing of what they had to say—as was the case throughout the war.173 A current pretense is that principled critics of the war had access to the mainstream media during these years. In fact, they were almost entirely excluded, and now we are regaled with accounts of their alleged crimes but are almost never permitted to hear their actual words, exactly as one would expect in a properly functioning system of indoctrination with the task of preserving privilege and authority from critical analysis.

The Times informs us that Vietnam “now stands exposed as the Prussia of Southeast Asia,” because since 1975 they have “unleashed a series of pitiless attacks against their neighbors,” referring to the Vietnamese invasion that overthrew the Pol Pot regime (after two years of border attacks from Cambodia), the regime that we now support despite pretenses to the contrary. Although the Times is outraged at the Prussian-style aggression that overthrew our current Khmer Rouge ally, and at the Vietnamese insistence that a political settlement must exclude Pol Pot, the reader of its pages will find little factual material about any of these matters. There are, incidentally, countries that have “unleashed a series of pitiless attacks against their neighbors” in these years—for example, Israel, with its invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982—but as an American client state, Israel inherits the right of aggression, so it does not merit the bitter criticism Vietnam deserves for overthrowing Pol Pot; and in any event, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was a “liberation,” as the Times explained at the time, always carefully excluding Lebanese opinion on the matter as obviously irrelevant.174

The Times recognizes that the United States did suffer “shame” during its Indochina wars: “the shame of defeat.” Victory, we are to assume, would not have been shameful, and the record of aggression and atrocities generally supported by the Times evokes no shame. Rather, the United States thought it was “resisting” Communists “when it intervened in Indochina”; how we “resist” the natives defending their homes from our attack, the Times does not explain.

That the United States lost the war in Indochina is “an inescapable fact” (Wall Street Journal), repeated without question throughout the retrospectives and in American commentary generally. The truth is more complex, although to see why, it is necessary to escape the confines of the propaganda system and to investigate the rich documentary record that lays out the planning and motives for the American wars in Indochina over thirty years. This record shows that a rather different conclusion is in order, an important fact to understand.

The United States did not achieve its maximal goals in Indochina, but it did gain a partial victory. Despite talk by Eisenhower and others about Vietnamese raw materials, the primary U.S. concern was not Indochina but rather the “domino effect,” the demonstration effect of independent development that might cause “the rot to spread” to Thailand and beyond, perhaps ultimately drawing Japan into a “New Order” from which the United States would be excluded.175 This threat was averted as the United States proceeded to teach the lesson that a “‘war of liberation’ . . . is costly, dangerous and doomed to failure” (Kennedy adviser General Maxwell Taylor, testifying to Congress).176 The countries of Indochina will be lucky to survive; they will not endanger global order by social and economic success in a framework that denies the West the freedom to exploit, infecting regions beyond, as