Vietnam declared independence following World War II and the defeat of Japanese forces, setting the stage for three decades of US intervention, which would cost the lives of up to nearly 4 million people in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Laos, and over 58,000 American service personnel.

This is working class history.

Today we continue our series of episodes about the Vietnam War, and I'm very pleased to be joined by author and activist, and perhaps the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy, Noam Chomsky. With Professor Chomsky, we explore the geopolitics of the conflict, and what the rationale was for US military involvement and we examine the prevailing intellectual and media narratives about the conflict. Then we're

going to look at the human cost of the war, primarily on the civilian population of the region.

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Professor Chomsky, can you tell us what was the background to U.S. involvement in Vietnam?

Well, the background begins right after the Second World War. At that point, the U.S. was in a position of overwhelming power with no precedent in history.

Planners knew about it. They'd been planning for it for several years because they assumed that

that would be the outcome of the war. And it was in a position to try to organize and determine the structure of almost the entire

post-war world and there were several conflicting concerns and Vietnam's falls right within them.

One goal was to create what was called an open society,

a society in which, in practice, it would mean U.S.-based enterprises would be free to

invest, to exploit resources and so on.

It was to be a level playing field, but level means the guy with all the power wins,

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