(FinalCall.com) -- The September 11th attacks took most Americans completely by surprise.  They shouldn�t have.

It�s been over 25 years since America�s defeat in Vietnam.  America�s 15-year military involvement in Southeast Asia should be closely studied, because it speaks volumes on the recent worldwide upsurge in the use of military violence to solve political and economic problems.  As we look back upon that war, we should be careful not to forget the incredible suffering heaped upon the people of that region, which lost over two million citizens, in a war for independence, which they fought first against France and finally against the United States.

The war, which cost 55,000 Americans their lives, was not only a drain on the American economy and its ability to fully cultivate our human resources, but it also traumatized many of the people who served there, America�s national mind-set and the country�s international image. If the war had mainly been about body counts, clearly the United States would have won. But the people we fought are now the government of Vietnam. We left. They stayed. As with the war in Iraq, in Vietnam the United States decisively won the military components of the war, but pitifully lost the political and social aspects, including world opinion.

Modern warfare, "asymmetrical war," obviously has a significant military aspect, but the primary context is political. The most important goal is to win "the hearts and minds" of people.

Considering the fact that the United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of Ohio, than were dropped by all sides fighting in World War II combined, it�s a wonder there�s a Vietnam left to discuss.  Today, as the U.S. government searches the planet for, and through its policies, creates new enemies, we should admit that most Americans underestimated the Vietnamese, in part, because they were of color, physically smaller, and poor.  Foreign policy planners never fully took into consideration the strength of their culture and their historic inclination to fight foreign domination.

The Cold Warriors never understood that the roots of the Vietnamese national liberation movement were in Vietnam and not the Soviet Union or China.  Opposition to the American presence was not caused by Ho Chi Minh. Most of the foreign policy planners never figured that the Vietnamese would respond to the carpet-bombing of their homeland with a greater sense of national unity and commitment to not be overwhelmed.

They responded in a way not unlike the British, when, during World War II, the Nazis incorrectly assumed that they could bomb Great Britain into submission.  Prime Minister Winston Churchill came back with his, now famous, "Britain�s finest hour" speeches.  The Nazi bombing actually served to unify and weld British public opinion. 

This should be of particular interest to today�s strategists, since the United States has embarked upon a strategy of aerial bombing of military and civilian targets in so-called "low intensity operations."  For decades, what�s now called "the war on terrorism" was conducted in secret and has often included what the State Department likes to refer to as extra-legal detention and interrogation, also known as kidnapping and torture, and target neutralization, also know as assassination and murder. Read former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell�s books, "In Search of Enemies" and "The Secret Wars of the CIA" for many of the gory details.

It�s remarkable that so many Americans, today, stand ready to repeat similarly horrific mistakes around the world.  It�s as though they somehow slept through the last four decades.  Some people have selective historical amnesia and have conveniently forgotten, while others are in denial, about the millions of innocent civilians killed over the last 40 years by brutal American-trained, directed and supplied right-wing governments� death squads and other assorted Contra/UNITA-like terrorists in Latin America and the Caribbean; or United States support of the criminal apartheid government and numerous mercenary and terrorist elements throughout much of Southern and Central Africa; or the CIA-sponsored overthrow of elected governments in such places as Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, Congo and Iran, not to mention guerillas trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight the Soviet army, who appear to be boomeranging against the United States government, its allies, and non-combatant civilians.

We continue to misread history and hopelessly look for military solutions to deep social, political and economic inequities.  These un-redressed grievances, give rise to revolutionary movements. 

President John F. Kennedy stated, "Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible, make violent revolutions inevitable." Revolutions, whether they be violent or nonviolent, are not caused by terrorists, spies, agents or as Bull Connor used to say, "outside agitators," but by social realities such as rising consciousness and expectations, economic exploitation, corruption, poverty, torture, murder, the theft of national wealth by undemocratic foreign-backed elites, occupation, and the absence of self-determination.

If we really want to dramatically reduce the presence of, if not end, so-called terrorism, we must sincerely address these circumstances.  Peace is more than the absence of war; it suggests the presence of justice.  If we truly want peace, we will heed the peoples� cries for justice.