Vietnam in Retrospect

Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token US armed forces in Indochina would be a serious diversion of limited US capabilities."[1]--Joint Chiefs of Staff, 26 May 1954 Notwithstanding the departure of the last US combat troops from Vietnam in 1973, the Vietnam War continues to be fought and refought here in the United States.Wars are unpleasant to wage, and even more unpleasant to lose.The Vietnam War has divided Americans as has no other foreign conflict since the War of 1812.George McGovern, politically both product and victim of the war, has declared it "our second civil war.We are going to be fighting [it] for the rest of our lives."[2] Was the war a noble cause, a crime, or simply a monumental strategic mistake?Did 58,000 Americans die in vain?What was the cause and nature of the conflict?Was US intervention justified?Was it necessary to Americanize the war?What were the causes of US defeat?Was the United States in fact defeated?These are among the many questions Vietnam-generation Americans continue to ponder, especially those whose lives were directly touched by the war.But perhaps none is more agonizing--and intriguing--than that of whether the United States could have won the war.To this and so many other questions posed by Vietnam there can be no definitive answers.The decisions that propelled the United States into Vietnam and that determined the way we fought the war cannot be undone for the sake of testing what are by now academic hypotheses.One can only speculate about what might have been.Yet the passage of time has afforded a capacity for more informed judgment; we now know much more about the consequences of decisions than we did at the time they were made.Distance, together with the Cold War's demise, also offers the opportunity to develop perspectives on the war less contaminated by blind passion and by the once unquestioned verities of what in hindsight seems a strategically and intellectually hysterical anti-communism. War AimsAny fruitful discussion of whether the United States could have won the war in Vietnam requires an agreeable definition of winning.What were declared US war aims?The most immediate and enduring was the preservation of a noncommunist South Vietnam.Satisfaction of this objective, policymakers believed, would not only save yet another people from the yoke of communism, but also serve such broader and more abstract war aims as demonstrating resolve and the credibility of US commitments, thwarting the fall of other Asian dominoes to communism, containing Chinese expansionism, and meeting the challenge posed by communist-inspired wars of national liberation.The Johnson and Nixon administrations sought at the very least to avoid defeat and its perceived attendant humiliation, loss of prestige, and orgy of domestic political recrimination.Indeed, as early as 1966 defeat-avoidance was becoming, for an increasing number of civilian officials, the central US war aim in Vietnam.Secretary of Defense Robert S.McNamara is known to have harbored serious doubts about the war's winnability as early as late 1965.[3] In that same year, his close and trusted aide John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, declared in a memo that "70 percent" of the US purpose in Vietnam was "to avoid a humiliating defeat";[4] in early 1966 he further concluded that "We . . .have in Vietnam the ingredients of an enormous miscalculation. . . .The reasons we went into Vietnam to the present depth are varied; but largely academic."

Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• Bombing to win

  Robert Anthony Pape•Bombing to win•1996

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• Intervention

  Timothy J Lomperis, George Mct Kahin•Journal of American History•1987

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• The 25-Year War

  Andrew J Pierre, General Bruce Palmer•Foreign Affairs•1984

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• About Face

  Gregory F Treverton, David H Hackworth•Foreign Affairs•1989

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• The Irony of Vietnam

  Blema S Steinberg, Leslie H Gelb et al.•Pacific Affairs•1980

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