File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 125


From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: BBC: Hmmmm!? US/Argentina will not invade Colombia...
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 14:51:04 -0500 (CDT)


Nestor asks:

> Would the American people stand a second Viet Nam, this time at their 
> own doorsteps?  That is another question posed by the mail sent by D. 
> Grammennos.  Can someone give a hint?

This is actually, of course, several questions, all of which I have mulled
over in my own mind in the last two decades.

The first question revolves around the precise content of the phrase, "a
Viet Nam."

The movement against that war took a number of years to build, and really
only accumulated momentum as U.S. casualties grew. When a representative
of the Sandinistas spoke here (Illinois State University) in the early
stages of the Contra war, I made this point to him, asking "How long can
you hold out?" Meaning, that before momentum against U.S. intervention
could grow, much time had to pass. His answer then, which we now know to
have been incorrect, was "As long as it takes."

And this connects with a second point: the non-existence now of the USSR.
The resistance of the Vietnamese people to the U.S. invasion could draw on
the support (with whatever limitations) of the U.S.S.R, and the existence
of the Cold War and the nuclear power of the U.S.S.R. put *some* limits on
the U.S. That limiting factor is now gone. Now I have read a number of
accounts, published in North Vietnam, of the horrifying impact of the
first US assault there (1965?), which according to those accounts was
horrifyingly successful. It took over a year for the Vietnamese to recover
from that assault and again resume the offensive. Could they have done so
without external support?

So to rephrase my first question: *Can there be a "Viet Nam" in a third
world nation without external support (military supplies, etc.)? Or, what
chances would the Columbian resistance have against a U.S. assault such as
the Vietnamese barely held up under in 1965?

And that question is crucial because of the validity still today of a
point U.S. Grant made in his memoirs. He called the Mexican War the most
unjust war ever fought by a large power against a small power. He then
added that *after a war has begun*, political resistance to it will always
collapse.

We discovered in the 1960s that if a war went on *long enough* and
encounted enough military resistance, Grant's point was not necessarily
correct.

We found out on the occasion of the Gulf War that Grant's point still held
for a short war. Here in Bloomington Normal we generated, the weekend
before the ground war began, a larger and potentially more militant
demonstration against the war then we had ever generated even in the last
years of the Vietnam war. When our coalition again met a week later, no
one but the veterans of the Central-America solidarity movement was there.


NATURALLY, many of us (probably more than during the Gulf War) will do all
we can to generate resistance to any U.S. intervention in Columbia. But I
still can't really even tentatively answer Nestor's question.

Carrol



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