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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
259
starve while US firms profit, all with the most noble intent, always
willing to concede that “we may have made mistakes” in our innocence,
as we and our subjects march forward with arms linked to an ever more
brilliant future.
The same convenient innocence served well as we turned to
slaughtering the natives in Indochina. In February 1965, the US
extended its war against South Vietnam by initiating the regular
bombardment of North Vietnam, and more significantly, as Bernard Fall
observed, began “to wage unlimited aerial warfare inside [South
Vietnam] at the price of literally pounding the place to bits,” the decision
that “changed the character of the Vietnam war” more than any other.
These moves inspired the distinguished liberal commentator of the New
York Times, James Reston, “to clarify America’s present and future
policy in Vietnam”:
The guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1945 has
been that no state shall use military force or the threat of military
force to achieve its political objectives. And the companion of this
principle has been that the United States would use its influence
and its power, when necessary and where it could be effective,
against any state that defied this principle.
This is the principle that was “at stake in Vietnam,” where “the
United States is now challenging the Communist effort to seek power by
the more cunning technique of military subversion” (the United States
having blocked all efforts at political settlement because it knew the
indigenous opposition would easily win a political contest, and after 10
years of murderous repression and three years of US Air Force bombing
in the south). 204
In November 1967, when Bernard Fall, long a strong advocate of US