Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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Therefore the internal security apparatus must be improved, to nip any
such dangers in the bud. Like the Duarte government today in El
Salvador, Bell perceived the danger of allowing the left to organize
politically, since such “subversion” might impede the Fifth Freedom and
harm its local affiliates (see section 3 above). Social reforms may be
considered, but they are dangerous too. The Plan noted that better
education might make people “all the more aware of the hopelessness of
their status . . . and more susceptible to communist agitation.” It is
better to send helicopter gunships, which “will be of great utility in
rescue operations and in other tasks in community assistance,” as
Ambassador Bell’s successor thoughtfully explained in 1967 while the
security forces with direct US military participation were in the process
of slaughtering thousands of peasants. 36
Kennedy’s military and counterinsurgency adviser General Maxwell
Taylor pointed out in 1965 that in Vietnam “We were too late in
recognizing the extent of the subversive threat.” By April 1965, when
the outright US land invasion of South Vietnam took place, some
160,000 South Vietnamese had been killed, largely in US-sponsored
terror operations, according to figures cited by the bitterly anti-
Communist French military historian Bernard Fall, many of them “under
the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and,
finally, vomiting gases” (Fall), with some 80,000 killed by 1961 in state
terror operations that had finally evoked resistance. 37 But this was not
enough; we had not come to the rescue of the people we were
assassinating in time or with sufficient violence. The “outstanding
lesson” of this experience, Taylor explained to the police academy
cadets, “is that we should never let another Vietnam-type situation arise
again . . . We have learned the need for a strong police force and a
strong police intelligence organization to assist in identifying early the
symptoms of an incipient subversive situation,” so that appropriate