[clock_tower]

> what we learned from the unrest that the U.S. faced during the Vietnam war era.

That the counterculture and the Communists were actively trying to make us lose a war? The author of this discusses real problems with the US -- situations like Guatemala, where we backed a feudal aristocracy, or Iran, where we set the country back considerably by helping overthrow Mossadeq -- and not just conspiracies carried out by our enemies.

Thinking about the meaning of "empire", I wonder if it would've been better for the US to have made various outright annexations after WWII. Not having to deal with an independent local government, or with self-interested local elites, makes things clearer and easier; the US's interventions in El Salvador or Guatemala would've been significantly less nasty if they had begun with annexation and the extension of domestic policies like EITC, Social Security, and property tax...

[lr4444lr]

Far though I may be from supporting that counterculture, we lost almost 10X as many troops fighting in Vietnam - many conscripted - than in the middle east, and we hadn't suffered any attack from that part of the world on the scope of 9/11. I was not alive during the Vietnam War, but it's been my distinct impression that its critics saw our involvement there as straight military-industrial complex imperialism, fueled by the same kind of propagandistic nationalism / fear of the "other" the author discusses. I don't see what substantially new perspective the author is raising.

I can't speak to Latin America, but I recall that General Patton upon the 3rd Reich's surrender in Berlin wanted to quickly broker peace with a friendly German government so that he could press on eastward to Moscow and put an end to the Soviet Union while it was in a weakened state from the failed German invasion. Historic counterfactuals sure are interesting to think about.