Reply #8: There are a lot of elements to this, of course, making the conjecture [View All]

almost too impossibly open-ended to handle.

But to take a swing at it: Vietnam was a singular defeat for the ruling elite of this country. The main reason for this was unfortunately not the enormity of the American crimes, which are still almost entirely unappreciated & unrecognized in US society. Rather, it was the draft, & the body bags. The 57k US dead counted, in the usual US-o-centric way, for many times the 3-4 million Vietnamese dead.

Three major things happened almost contemporaneously: Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the end of the 25-yr post-war economic boom. All of these things were very serious body blows for the established order. And they determined the intensity of the backlash, which started after Nixon left office, & have culminated in the ascension of GW Bush.

So my first guess is: had Vietnam not happened, the countering wave of reaction would not have been so intense. The Mellon Scaifes of the world were seriously frightened by the late '60's; it increased their resolve to see that no such rebellion would ever rise again.

Secondly, the military build-up for Vietnam contributed to the inflation of the 70's. So this too, might have been less, had Vietnam not happened.

Though Vietnam was in reality a sort of showcase exposing the deeply criminal nature of many sections of US society, the lessons were mostly lost on the US public. Everyone acknowledges in some general way that it was "a mess," and a "mistake," but few realize how horrible it really was. The chemical bombing of SE Asia was an atrocity, probably worse than anything in the 20th century except WWII.

In the mid 1970's certain aspects of the crimes of the US govt came to light, with the Pentagon Papers, the exposure of COINTELPRO, the Church Commission, & of course Watergate. However, no lasting lesson was learned, as Bush is doing all the same things again, and worse. Thus one thing that CANNOT be said, is that the US public really learned anything from the experience. (Unfortunately, it CAN be said that the rightwing learned a lot from their mistakes of the Vietnam era -- and haven't repeated them. That's a significant difference.)

On balance: had Vietnam not happened, my take is that some bad things would not have happened in quite such damaging ways. But the difference would not be great. The US would not be the US, if it was not deeply engaged in the unlimited growth of militarism, an unending ruthless search for increased control of resources abroad, & the efficient use of propaganda to hide the real motivations of government from the population domestically.