Why We Fight Page #7

We appeal to people self-interest.

And then put them into a situation

which is based on self-sacrifice.

I don't really have a much of a blood family.

My mom was the only blood...

Hold on.

Hello.

Hello?

Yeah, Jimmy.

I've got real good friends and they've been

just as good as a blood family,

but not that supportive of me going in this.

They try to give me boogie man stories

about what's gonna happen in basic.

As rough as basic can be,

this can't be as bad as they say.

I've no word.

Right now you have more of

the separation between the military

and particularly the middle class

and the upper middle class

in this country than existed

even in the draft era.

If you go back to Vietnam,

basically the inequity...

of the draft helped prolong the war.

As long as the poor and unrepresented

were dying people went along with it.

We got out of Vietnam effectively

when the lottery started

and middle class kids were getting killed.

First thing that happened was they

went to this all-volunteer army.

And that solved the draft inequity problem,

cause everybody's the volunteer.

This is supposedly a Stealth

helicopter which hopefully

will go into service by the

time I'll become a pilot.

And that makes the military much easier to use.

Because:
You guys are f***ing volunteers,

screw you, you signed up for this.

The objections don't carry as much water.

In a period of increased tension, the advantage

gain by flying men into position quickly

might represent the difference between

success or failure in a military operation.

I arrived in Vietnam in July of 1965.

I was part of the build-up of the 50,000 troops.

I remember saying to one of mine bodies:

You know, this keeps up, they're gonna

have a 100,000 troops over here.

And he laughed, he said: What are you nuts?

They'd have to declare war for 100,000 troops.

My fellow Americans, renew to cost elections

against the United States ships on

the highest ease in the gulf of Tomkin

have today required me to

order the military forces...

of the United States to take action in reply.

I was assigned to a helicopter company,

I was a door gunner on one of the helicopters.

It was quite an experience

for a 21 year old kid.

We're involved in taking people's lives.

From the perspective of a helicopter,

you're X number hundred to feet.

And you're shooting at little dots

that are running around.

You're not shooting at somebody face to face.

There's a blue shirt in the trees

around here. Turn right!

It's almost like they're not real human beings.

They're objects.

As the refugee of war,

I think I understand first hand

the suffering, the pain, that war could cost.

I came here when I was 15.

We left Saigon on the 28th of April 1975,

right before the downfall of Saigon.

I was very lucky to make it here intact.

I always was very much aware of why I'm here.

It's because our strong thirst for

freedom that brought me here.

And the sacrifice of other

people that brought me here.

A full scale evacuation have been ordered.

But I do remember the

desperation. A lot of people

indeed fell down, the Americans have

left them there for themselves.

America deliberately withdrew all the support.

But I step down from the American people.

I grew up knowing that

should the situation rise,

you are expected to answer the call

when you country made the call.

There was no such thing as:

Well I wonder if my country is right,

is anybody lying to me about this?

You don't grow up thinking that.

You grow up saying if the bugle calls, you go.

With time we find out this whole

goal for Tomkin thing was farce

and nobody was really attacked.

So you say to yourself:

You know what, that's really crappy,

why did somebody lie to us?

There was no need to lie.

We have been lied to in every military escapade

frankly over the last 50-60

years without exception.

There's no battery example

probably then Vietnam.

You had the President of the United States

and the top generals in Pentagon lying about the

Gulf of Tomkin incident

that got us into the war.

About the casualties, about

how the war was going.

Anyone who has ever looked

closely at the Vietnam war

can see that the public and the media

were manipulated substantially.

We don't like to think of

ourselves as the militant nation,

but we're in fact incredibly

militant and militaristic nation.

It is not a view of ourselves that we wanna

carry around, but the fact is we are.

If the President and the military industrial

complex and defense establishment,

if they all have decided that

suddenly there's a problem somewhere,

we need to drop some bombs or even put

blend forces somewhere in some country,

this is our ritual that we

have been seeing for decades.

We have toppled governments,

we've done Coup Ousts.

We've used intelligence

services for covert purposes...

and done horrible things around the world.

And we have put up with the most

human rights abusing countries.

We have prop them up, we even trained them

how to commit human rights abuses.

Today's demon was yesterday's friend.

All in the name of either the cold war

or for commercial reasons.

It's basically economic colonialism.

No one uses the colonialism word.

But instead of just taking over the

countries, we have a better way.

We just go and have free

markets whether we're trying...

to sell our products to their citizens

or we're trying to mind their resources.

We need to be in that country for some reason,

therefore we're gonna talk

about free markets, free trade.

But what's really going on is we want our

companies to get rich in your country.

HALLIBURTON COMPANY PROMOTIONAL FILM 1951

There she is. That's what all the fuss is about.

Oil. That's kind of pretty, isn't it?

Oil. Coming up out of the ground and

making life a bit more easy for all of us.

The United States is the world's

largest consumer of fossil fuels.

Oil is what drives the military

machine of every country.

Whether it provides the fuel, or the aircraft

for the ships, for the tanks, for the crocks.

Control of oil is indispensable.

When you run out of it, your army stops.

There is a direct connection

between events that happened

more than 50 years ago

and the war in Iraq today.

In 1953 the Prime Minister of Iran,

Muhammad Mossadegh became extremely irritated.

The British were ripping off his

country's national resources.

He wanted a greater share in it.

The British came to the new President Eisenhower

and asked for help on this.

Eisenhower very conveniently declared

Mossadegh to be a communist

and we then set the CIA to overthrow him.

Three days of bloody rioting

come to a military...

The result was we brought the Shah to power

and he created an extremely repressive regime

that within 20 years had led

to a revolution against him.

Ajtulogh Almeny creates a government

that is violently anti-American.

Then he said:
I pray the God to cut

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