As always, Zinn weaves the threads of impe­ri­al­ism by not­ing the sim­i­lar­i­ties to the Iraq occu­pa­tion to Viet­nam in this col­lec­tion pub­lished at Asia Times.

When I read the hun­dreds of pages of the Pen­ta­gon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ells­berg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Secu­rity Coun­cil. Explain­ing the US inter­est in South­east Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for “tin, rub­ber, oil”.

Nei­ther the deser­tions of sol­diers in the Mex­i­can War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the cen­tury, nor the strong oppo­si­tion to World War I — indeed no anti-war move­ment in the his­tory of the nation reached the scale of the oppo­si­tion to the war in Viet­nam. At least part of that oppo­si­tion rested on an under­stand­ing that more than Viet­nam was at stake, that the bru­tal war in that tiny coun­try was part of a grander impe­r­ial design.

Also read an inter­view of Zinn about Barack Obama here