After all these years I continue to have mixed [confused? :-)] feelings about anti-war movements that blossom during the midst of a conflict even though I also have problems with the wars themselves. In the case of the Vietnam War, I see the movement as instrumental, though not totally responsible, for the US withdrawal.

The key decision makers were the corporate elite who decided the war was too costly and unnecessary:

Chomsky: Well, let's take say, the Vietnam War - probably the leading critic, and in fact one of the leading dissident intellectuals in the mainstream, is Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who did finally come around to opposing the Vietnam War about 1969 - about a year and a half after Corporate America had more or less ordered Washington to call it off, and his picture from then on is that the war (as he put it) began with blundering efforts to do good, but it ended up by 1969 being a disaster and costing us too much - and that's the criticism...

Marr: So, what would the "non-propaganda model" have told Americans about the Vietnam War at the same time?

Chomsky: Same thing that the mainstream press was telling them about Afghanistan. The United States invaded South [Vietnam]... had first of all in the 1950s set up a standard Latin American-style terror state, which had massacred tens of thousands of people, but was unable to control local uprising (and everyone knows - at least every specialist knows - that's what it was), and when Kennedy came in, in 1961, they had to make a decision, because the South [Vietnamese] government was collapsing under local attack, so the U.S. just invaded the country. In 1961 the U.S. airforce started bombing South Vietnamese civilians, authorised Napalm crop destruction... then in 1965 - January, February 1965 - the next major escalation took place against South Vietnam, not against North Vietnam - that was a sideshow - that's what an honest press would be saying, but you can't find a trace of it.

http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/interviews/9602-big-idea.html

  Ironically, I also strongly believe that it was also partially responsible for the war's longevity and sometimes worry that the current movement may also be contributing on some level, albeit to a lesser extent, to the continuance of the war in Iraq.

Explain this bizarre accusation.


Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.