9781557506993

Chapter One

IN HIS MASTERPIECE, On War , Carl von Clausewitz observed that the "first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish ... the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."

Unfortunately, U.S. foreign policy decision makers in the mid-1960s committed a supreme act of misjudgment by intervening directly in the Vietnam War. Intervention proved calamitous. Among other things, it violated an established strategic injunction against committing U.S. military power to a large-scale land war on the mainland of Asia. Since World War II, U.S. military leaders, including Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, and Matthew Ridgway, had cautioned against ground combat involvement in wars on the Asian mainland, where, it was felt, U.S. naval and air power's effectiveness would be diluted, and where Asian foes could exploit their great superiority in manpower and bog the United States down in a protracted conflict. This strategically sound aversion underpinned the Truman administration's refusal to commit U.S. ground forces on behalf of the Nationalist Chinese government in the latter half of the 1940s as well as its opposition to MacArthur's pleas in 1951 to widen the Korean War. It also played a significant role in the Eisenhower administration's refusal in 1954 to intervene on behalf of beleaguered French forces in Indochina.

The profound misjudgment that propelled the United States into the Vietnam War was captured in two November 1961 cables from Gen. Maxwell Taylor to President Kennedy, which are reprinted in The Pentagon Papers . Taylor, the president's special military representative and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, recommended the introduction of U.S. ground combat troops into Vietnam. He did so despite his own estimation: that the "strategic reserve of U.S. forces is presently so weak that we can ill afford any detachment of forces to a peripheral area of the communist bloc where they will be pinned down for an uncertain duration"; that "U.S. prestige is already engaged in SVN [South Vietnam]" and "will become more so by the sending of troops"; and that if "the first contingent is not enough to accomplish the necessary results, it will be difficult to resist the pressure to reinforce." Having offered compelling reasons to stay out of Vietnam, Taylor went on to declare that for U.S. troops "SVN is not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate" and that the "risks of backing into a major Asian war by way of South Vietnam are not impressive," in part because "North Vietnam is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing." For Taylor, the case for introducing American ground combat troops boiled down to the conclusions that "there can be no action so convincing to the people and Government of SVN and to our other friends and allies in SEA [Southeast Asia]" and that the troops would "produce the desired effect on national morale in SVN and on international opinion." Maxwell Taylor, to paraphrase 1988 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen's remark about Dan Quayle, may have known Matthew Ridgway (his former Army superior and decisive opponent among the Joint Chiefs of Staff of U.S. military intervention to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954), but he himself certainly was no Matthew Ridgway.

To be sure, the U.S. decision in 1950 to fight in Korea seemed to violate the injunction against mainland wars. Yet that decision did not assume the possibility of decisive Chinese counterintervention, without which the war would have been successfully concluded within a matter of months. When the Chinese did come in, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sagely resisted calls from an unnerved and humiliated MacArthur for military operations against China. A wider conflict, JCS Chairman Bradley warned, would embroil the United States "in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." Unlike their Vietnam War successors, the Chiefs during the Korean War supported the White House's determination to cap U.S. investment in the war; they opposed escalation on the grounds that it would endanger more important U.S. commitments elsewhere. This fundamental consensus on the conflict's proper scope (MacArthur faced a united civil-military front in Washington) accounts in no small measure for the Korean War's lack of an attendant stab-in-the-back myth. Bradley and the other Chiefs wanted stringent limits on U.S. military liability in Korea, and they supported President Truman's sacking of MacArthur as a means of enforcing those limits.

There was also a consensus on the nature of the conflict. During at least the early years of the Vietnam War there was serious dispute within both civilian and military decision-making institutions over whether the war was predominantly an internal insurgency or conventional cross-border aggression. But in the early 1950s, U.S. political and military leaders (correctly) regarded the Korean War as largely a linear, conventional fight in which territory taken and held was the proper and reliable measure of success.

Moreover, the peninsular geography and barren topography of Korea permitted a very effective use of conventional U.S. military forces, especially naval and air power. Indochina, however, was neither peninsular nor barren; on the contrary, it provided communist forces extensive staging areas and infiltration routes impervious to permanent denial by U.S. air or ground forces. It was a standing invitation to precisely the kind of war against which an older, wiser generation of U.S. military leaders had warned. Dean Rusk, who as secretary of state argued ad nauseam that the United States had to fight in Vietnam if for no other reason than because it was, in his (widely disputed) view, unalterably committed to do so under the provisions of the 1954 Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), later confessed that "I thought the SEATO Treaty was a mistake" precisely because "[n]o one really stopped to think what an American commitment to collective security on the Asian mainland might mean." This is a truly extraordinary admission; apparently Rusk, like McNamara (now known to have been disillusioned about the war by late 1965), had early and profound doubts about the efficacy of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but nonetheless stayed in office and continued to press publicly for an ever expanding commitment of U.S. blood and treasure to the war.

U.S. policymakers also accorded to events in Indochina a strategic significance far in excess of their actual and potential consequences for U.S. security. They further misread the character of the Vietnam War in a manner that promoted conventional U.S. military responses to what was still--in 1965--essentially a revolutionary political challenge. In doing all of these things, American decison makers committed to an exceedingly difficult conflict a measure of U.S. military power and national prestige disproportionate to the actual stakes involved. This overinvestment, moreover, made it all the more difficult later on to cut U.S. losses in Vietnam; on the contrary, it encouraged a policy of gradual escalation in the vain hope that at some point the communists would desist.

Even before the Tet Offensive, defeat avoidance was becoming the predominant de facto U.S. war aim, at least as far as the civilian leadership was concerned. By 1968 Lyndon Johnson had become skeptical of prospects for a conclusive military outcome in Vietnam, though he remained unwilling to escalate the war further. The Office of the Secretary of Defense had become demoralized, though McNamara could not muster the courage to resign. In 1965, McNamara's trusted lieutenant, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton, declared in a memo that "70 percent" of the U.S. purpose in Vietnam was "to avoid a humiliating defeat"; in early 1966, he further concluded: "We ... have in Vietnam the ingredients of an enormous miscalculation.... The reasons we went into Vietnam to the present depth are varied; but they are now largely academic." The Chiefs themselves may have concluded that they were not going to get the additional troops and operational freedom of action in Indochina they believed necessary to win the war. That they continued to press for more of both, even after the Tet Offensive had discredited Westmoreland's attrition strategy and fatally undercut American public support for the war, suggests they were motivated less by professional military confidence than by a desire to establish a robust record of rejected pleas as ammunition in the inevitable postwar debate over responsibility for losing Vietnam.

The search for an "honorable" peace continued for four years--and over twenty-two thousand additional American combat dead--under the Nixon administration, which, because it bore no responsibility for the unpopular war it had inherited, probably could have liquidated U.S. participation in the Vietnam War at an acceptable domestic political price. (Nixon's own impeccable anticommunist credentials might have served him as well in "closing" Vietnam in 1969 as they did in "opening" China three years later.) Instead, the administration, pre-occupied with salvaging American prestige, also chose to pursue a policy of defeat avoidance, though one based on the combination of a less restrained application of U.S. air power and a "vietnamization" strategy premised on the assumption that an expanded and better equipped South Vietnamese army could somehow succeed where American arms had failed. In the end, Nixon managed to postpone for a few years Saigon's inevitable day of reckoning with Hanoi; U.S. prestige probably suffered as much as it would have if the Nixon administration had simply walked away from Vietnam the day it took office.

In retrospect it is clear, as was persuasively argued at the time by such astute observers as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Walter Lippmann, that a U.S. fight to preserve an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam was essential neither to core U.S. security interests nor to America's reputation as a guarantor of other nations' security. Kennan, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 1966, asserted that, "Vietnam is not a region of major military, industrial importance. It is difficult to believe that any decisive developments of the world situation would be determined ... by what happens on that territory.... even a situation in which South Vietnam was controlled exclusively by the Viet Cong ... would not, in my opinion, present dangers great enough to justify our military intervention."

The decision to commit to an open-ended war in an area peripheral to traditional American security interests actually compromised U.S. ability to honor its commitments elsewhere, and raised serious questions among allies and foes alike about the soundness of America's strategic judgment. It confirmed the original assessment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the wake of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954: "Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. armed forces in Indochina would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities." Henry Kissinger, looking back on the war, contends that a proper "geopolitical approach geared to an analysis of the national interest would have differentiated between what was strategically significant and what was peripheral. It would have asked why America had thought it safe to stand by in 1948, when the communists conquered the huge prize of China, yet identified its national security with a much smaller Asian country that had not been independent for 150 years and had never been independent in its current borders."

Why indeed? The decision to abandon the Chinese Nationalist regime was strategically justified though politically controversial. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang was hopelessly corrupt and politically bankrupt. It was unable to compete in China's vast rural areas with the popular and well-disciplined communist forces of Mao Tse-tung; by late 1947 entire Nationalist army divisions, complete with their U.S.-supplied weapons, were defecting to the communist side. Moreover, it was highly doubtful that direct U.S. military intervention, which was opposed not only by the Truman administration but also by even the harshest congressional critics of its China policy, could have preserved the Nationalist government in power. There was in any event little in the way of usable U.S. conventional military power available in the late 1940s for employment in China. The pell-mell demobilization of the U.S. military establishment after World War II and the administration's growing concern over Soviet behavior in Europe combined to make any significant Chinese diversion a reckless course of action. Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Gen. George Marshall, who at one time or another served as secretary of state, secretary of defense, and Truman's special representative in China, simply did not believe that American interests in China were worth a war; the administration was prepared to provide indirect military assistance to Chiang as well as its good offices to broker a political settlement between the Kuomintang and the communists, but it was not prepared to shed American blood in China.

The U.S. decision to fight in South Vietnam must have perplexed Hanoi. Could a do-or-die stand really be expected from a United States that had abandoned China in 1948, had refused to save its French clients at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, had settled for a communist North Vietnam in that same year, had provided only fainthearted support to an attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961, and had agreed to Laos' neutralization in 1962? Was a United States whose leader had spent much of the 1964 presidential election campaign reassuring his own people that American boys were not going to be sent to fight and die in a war in which Asian boys should be shouldering that burden going to do exactly the opposite of what he said? Had the United States learned nothing from the French experience in Indochina? Did not the United States realize that its conventional armed forces had restricted utility in Indochina's operational and geopolitical setting?

If such was Hanoi's reasoning, it was certainly understandable. The United States might make a limited liability investment (i.e., naval, air, and advisory ground) in South Vietnam's defense, but surely it was not prepared to exhaust itself strategically for the sake of a politically weak and militarily incompetent regime in Saigon. One rarely presumes acts of foolishness on the part of one's enemies. Hanoi in 1964 had no more reason to believe that the United States was prepared to embark upon such a mindless dissipation of its power in Southeast Asia than did Westmoreland and his staff in late 1967 have reason to believe that Hanoi was about to expose the Viet Cong to certain decimation at the hands of American firepower for the sake of a misinformed and poorly coordinated general offensive. Nor could Hanoi have been expected to recognize that the political consequences in the United States of the Truman administration's "loss" of China in the late 1940s would have a significant bearing on the American approach to the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s.

The excessive significance U.S. policymakers attached to events in Indochina in the 1960s was evident both in the strength of perceived domestic political imperatives that made any consideration of abandoning South Vietnam without a fight unthinkable, and in the publicly declared reasons for intervention. Domestic political imperatives figured heavily in the U.S. decision to intervene in Vietnam. As Democrats, both Kennedy and Johnson bore the legacy of a political party whose presidents had "lost" both Eastern Europe and China to communism, had "permitted" the emergence of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union as a rival world power, and had waged a "no-win" war in Korea (i.e., denied MacArthur a conclusive victory over Red China). During the late 1940s and 1950s the Republicans, led by such redbaiters as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, indicted the Truman administration for being "soft on communism" at home and abroad. No post-McCarthy-era Democratic president could afford to give up additional real estate to communism; to do so would invite a right-wing backlash. (Only a war-hero Republican president like Eisenhower could have permitted the fall of North Vietnam.)

The argument that Kennedy, had he lived, would have steered the United States around and ultimately away from the kind of military investment his successor made in Vietnam must confront Kennedy's actual behavior as president: he approved escalation of the U.S. military advisory effort in Vietnam to direct U.S. involvement in combat operations in violation of the Geneva Accords of 1954, and he encouraged a coup against the Diem regime that dramatically elevated U.S. political responsibility for South Vietnam's fate. He did both of these things because he not only subscribed to the official rationales for a U.S. stand in Vietnam but also feared the domestic political reaction that abandonment of Vietnam would provoke. Having bungled a U.S.-sponsored invasion of communist Cuba and acceded to a neutralization scheme for Laos that many--including South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem--regarded as a sell-out to the communists, Kennedy could not afford to be seen as an appeaser in Vietnam. As he told senator and Vietnam skeptic Mike Mansfield after the Cuban Missile Crisis, "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Red scare on our hands." In July 1963 he is said to have told reporters at an off-the-record news conference: "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam.... But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and get the American people to reelect me."

Lyndon Johnson was even more consumed by dread of a domestic political backlash. As a young senator and later majority leader in the late 1940s and 1950s, he had witnessed first-hand the brutal Republican soft-on-communism assaults on the integrity of such impeccable patriots as Marshall and Acheson during the wave of anticommunist hysteria that swept the country following Mao Tse-tung's victory in China and the Soviet Union's explosion of an atomic bomb. Moreover, he regarded anything less than a strong stand in Vietnam as a threat to his ambitious domestic political agenda. A Johnson administration perceived as not allocating sufficient resources to defeat communism in Vietnam would provide opponents of the Great Society the perfect argument against proceeding with costly social and economic reforms at home. "Conservatives in Congress," he told Doris Kearns, "would use [the war] as a weapon against the Great Society. You see, they'd never wanted to help the poor or the Negroes in the first place. But they were having a hard time figuring out how to make their opposition sound noble in a time of great prosperity. But the war. Oh, they'd use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor--why, they were just as generous and charitable as the best of Americans--but because the war had to come first." Even the emergence of a strident, leftist antiwar movement didn't phase Johnson, who once cautioned Under Secretary of State George Ball to "pay no attention to what those little shits on the campuses do. The great beast is the reactionary elements in this country."

Reinforcing domestic political imperatives was a genuine conviction that a U.S. stand in Vietnam was indispensable to American security and international order. Indeed, the declared rationales for U.S. intervention in Vietnam accorded little intrinsic importance to a noncommunist South Vietnam, but instead conferred upon U.S. behavior there a transcendental and vital significance; the imperative of making a stand in Vietnam was regarded as far more momentous than Vietnam's actual fate. British counterinsurgency expert and occasional war advisor to the White House Sir Robert Thompson declared in 1968 that "the war will be of critical consequence to the future of the world ... and may well prove to be as decisive as any war in this century." Indeed, better even to fail in Vietnam than not intervene at all. "We cannot assert that a policy of sustained [bombing] reprisal [against North Vietnam] will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam," wrote National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy to President Johnson in February 1965, but "even if it fails, the policy will have been worth it. At a minimum, it will damp down the charge that we did not do all we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own." A year earlier, Bundy had conjectured in a memorandum to Johnson: "Question: in terms of domestic U.S. politics, which is better: to lose now or to lose after committing 100,000 men? Tentative answer: the latter." The United States must be seen to be willing to fight, whatever the result, because the stakes were so high. Even early journalistic critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam accorded critical importance to the war's outcome. "The fall of Southeast Asia," wrote Neil Sheehan in 1964, "would amount to a strategic disaster." A year later, David Halberstam concluded that South Vietnam "is perhaps only one of five or six nations that is truly vital to U.S. interests."

The record shows that U.S. entry into the Vietnam War was largely the product of strategic fright occasioned by the twin convictions that the United States was losing the Cold War, especially the war with Moscow and Beijing for power and influence in the Third World, and that communist expansion anywhere in the world was strategically unacceptable. In the early 1960s, U.S. policymakers considered the decolonizing underdeveloped world a crucial battleground in an era of East-West conventional military stalemate in Europe and eroding U.S. nuclear supremacy. They were, in fact, mesmerized by the challenge of so-called "wars of national liberation," touted in major speeches by Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1961 and by Chinese Defense Minister Lin Piao four years later as a cheap, low-risk, and disavowable means of furthering communist expansion in Asia and Africa. The key was what U.S. policymakers called "covert aggression," or simulation of civil war via reliance on the techniques of guerrilla rather than conventional warfare and on infiltration rather than overt cross-border attacks.

The importance of the Third World and of the national liberation war threat were assumed simply because Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi publicly regarded them as important. Moreover, notwithstanding a very mixed record of communist guerrilla insurgencies (success in China and northern Vietnam, but failure in Greece, Malaya, and the Philippines) that suggested the overriding importance of local political and economic conditions, wars of national liberation were believed to be easily exportable, and South Vietnam to be a test case for this new and insidious communist strategy. "The war in Vietnam," said Rusk in August 1965, "is a test of a technique of aggression: what the Communists, in their upside-down language, call `wars of national liberation.' They use the term to describe any effort by Communists, short of large-scale war, to destroy by force any non-Communist government.... if [this kind of aggression] against South Vietnam were permitted to succeed, the forces of militant Communism everywhere would be vastly heartened and we could expect to see so-called `wars of liberation' in Asia, Latin America, and Africa." Walt Rostow, Johnson's national security advisor and staunch proponent of intervention, defined wars of national liberation as "an international disease ..., guerrilla war designed, initiated, supplied, and led from outside an independent nation."

Policymakers thus read the war in Vietnam as but a local manifestation of an externally orchestrated conspiracy. "Our political leaders," observes Colin Powell, "led us into a war for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anticommunism, which was only a partial fit in Vietnam, where the war had its own historical roots in nationalism, anticolonialism and civil strife." In reading the war as an external plot, policymakers not only overlooked the powerful indigenous roots of the war in Vietnam but also conveniently simplified the case for U.S. intervention. Public and congressional opinion could hardly be expected to support the spilling of American blood in someone else's civil war, but that opinion could be carried for intervention if what appeared to be a civil war was in fact--or at least could be convincingly portrayed as--a new form of international communist aggression. In public testimony Rusk repeatedly cast the war in Vietnam as "an act of outside aggression as though the Hanoi regime had sent an army across the 17th parallel rather than infiltrating armed forces by stealth." He and others conceded (in the words of Under Secretary of State George Ball, who privately opposed intervention but publicly preached its virtues) that "if the Vietnam War were merely what the Communists say it is--an indigenous rebellion--then the United States would have no business taking sides in the conflict."

Not only would a successful U.S. stand in South Vietnam take the bloom off wars of national liberation; it would also thwart implementation of China's imperial agenda in Southeast Asia. Of all the misassumptions that guided the United States to disaster in Vietnam, perhaps none was as wrong and intellectually embarrassing as the conviction that North Vietnam and its communist brethren in South Vietnam were little more than instruments of Red Chinese expansionism. This conviction reflected an utter ignorance of the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations, an insufficient awareness of events within China in the early and mid-1960s, and a willingness to take at face value much of Beijing's rhetorical posturing vis-a-vis the Soviet Union on Third World issues.

The conclusion that Hanoi was a stalking horse for Beijing in Southeast Asia rested on surface appearances rather than serious inquiry. China and North Vietnam were, after all, both communist states (and neighboring ones at that); China had indeed provided significant military assistance to the Viet Minh during the French-Indochina War (and was to provide substantial material and manpower support, though not combat troops, to Hanoi in the 1960s); and both China and North Vietnam espoused wars of national liberation and world revolution. Kennedy certainly saw China's hand in the struggle in South Vietnam. Asked by David Brinkley in September 1963 if he doubted the domino theory, he replied: "No, I believe it. I think the struggle [in South Vietnam] is close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in Southeast Asia was China and the Communists. So I believe it." A year later, Secretary of Defense McNamara declared that "Hanoi's victory [in South Vietnam] would be a first step toward eventual Chinese hegemony over the two Vietnams and Southeast Asia and toward exploitation of the new [wars of liberation] strategy in other parts of the world." President Johnson agreed: "Over this war--and all Asia--is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peiping."

These judgments reflected a Cold War mentality that regarded communism and nationalism as utterly incompatible--a view perhaps valid in theory but not in practice. In 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Soviet and Chinese communist diplomatic recognition of the DRV "should remove any illusions as to the `nationalistic' nature of Ho Chi Minh's aims and reveal Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina." Judgments like these prompted John Kenneth Galbraith to observe later that in "the conspiratorial vision of world communism that developed following World War II, one thing was axiomatic. Communism outside the Soviet Union could never successfully identify itself with nationalism. It was a foreign as well as a wicked thing which no country could have except as it might be imposed or infiltrated from abroad." In 1951, astoundingly, Rusk himself characterized Mao's communist regime as "a colonial Russian government--a Slavic Manchukuo on a large scale. It is not the Government of China." In fact, all of the world's most prominent communist leaders of the day--Stalin, Mao, Tito, and Ho--had successfully identified with and captured nationalist sentiment in their respective countries. Moreover, China was--and remains--Vietnam's hereditary enemy. The two thousand-year history of Vietnam is largely a history of fierce resistance to Chinese aggression. Though culturally Chinese, the Vietnamese have always feared and distrusted their giant neighbor to the north, a fear and distrust born of a thousand years of hated Chinese rule. (China occupied Vietnam from 111 B.C. to A.D. 938, and later, from 1406 to 1428.)

Communism's spread to Vietnam changed little. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh was confronted with the choice of acceding to the return of French forces to the northern half of Vietnam, which was then occupied by Nationalist Chinese troops (for the purpose of receiving the surrender of Japanese troops), or letting the Chinese stay on without a firm departure date. Ho chose the return of French colonialism rather than letting the Chinese stick around. "It is better to sniff French dung for awhile," he said, "than to eat China's all our life."

In 1954 the Chinese and Russians sold out their communist comrades in Vietnam by pressuring the Viet Minh to accept a political settlement of the French-Indochina War far more favorable to Paris than the nearly hopeless French military position in Indochina warranted. Specifically, the Chinese pressured the Vietnamese communists at the Geneva Conference to make two concessions--concessions that paved the way for the establishment in the South of a rival, anticommunist regime which, with U.S. assistance, delayed Vietnam's reunification under communist auspices for another twenty-one years. The Chinese, who for their own reasons wanted an end to the French-Indochina War and were prepared to threaten their Vietnamese comrades with a cessation of military assistance to obtain it, insisted that Ho Chi Minh and his Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) accept a negotiated settlement that (1) mandated a military truce but postponed a resolution of political issues until nationwide elections scheduled in 1956, and (2) delimited the DRV's southern boundary at the Seventeenth Parallel. Ho and his colleagues felt--and were--betrayed. They believed that the combination of France's political exhaustion and the Viet Minh's commanding military position (controlling at least three-quarters of Vietnam's territory and population) entitled them to an immediate and comprehensive political settlement highly favorable to the communist cause. Absent such a settlement, they would accept a DRV southern boundary at least as far south as the Thirteenth Parallel, which would give the DRV both the exquisite natural port of Da Nang (Tourane) and the historical and psychological prize of Hue, the old imperial capital.

Lin Piao's famous September 1965 speech, "Long Live the Victory of People's War," though interpreted by the Johnson administration as an incitement to worldwide revolution and a declaration of unqualified Chinese support for a communist victory in Vietnam, was in fact a warning to Hanoi not to expect any direct Chinese intervention on the DRV's behalf. Lin characterized Vietnam as a testing ground for both a people's war and American efforts to defeat it; but he also in effect told the Vietnamese that this was their war, stressing the necessity for self-reliance and avoidance of reckless military action. (Lin was preaching a Chinese version of the Nixon Doctrine four years before Nixon had a chance to proclaim it.) China was on the verge of starting its long march toward the disaster of the Great Cultural Revolution, a domestic political upheaval of titanic proportions prompted in part by a bitter dispute within the political leadership over whether the Soviet Union was supplanting the United States as the main threat to China's security. Under such circumstances, and with memories of the horrendous losses the Americans had inflicted on Chinese forces in Korea, Beijing had every reason to avoid war with the United States (and had, in fact, indicated to the United States that it would not intervene in the Vietnam War unless the Americans invaded North Vietnam).

Nor did China have an interest in the creation of a powerful, unified and Soviet-allied Vietnam hostile to Chinese interests in Southeast Asia. Indeed, the emergence of just such a Vietnam in the 1970s (highlighted by Hanoi's formal alliance with the Soviet Union, the brutal expulsion of Chinese living in Vietnam, and Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and defeat of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge there) induced the Chinese in early 1979 to launch a short but bloody invasion of Vietnam's northernmost provinces.

So much for the Vietnamese as Chinese stooges. A genuinely informed focus on containing Chinese imperialism in Southeast Asia in the 1960s would have dictated--at the very minimum--U.S. acquiescence to the establishment of a strong reunified Vietnam under any--though preferably noncommunist--auspices. The Russians, who successfully courted the DRV in the Sino-Soviet struggle for influence in Hanoi, understood this even if the United States did not. Indeed, for the Russians, the Vietnam War was a strategic windfall: it bogged American military power down in a peripheral area while at the same time providing the foundation for the DRV's ultimate recruitment as an important Soviet client in Moscow's own campaign to curb Chinese imperialism.

The failure to recognize that Vietnam was not an agent of Chinese southward expansionism but rather a potential obstacle to it stemmed from a view of communism as, at worst, a monolithic international conspiracy, and, at best, as a powerful international movement set upon global domination and capable of subordinating local nationalist impulses to the demands of ideological conformity. Indeed, U.S. policymakers were wont to equate communism in the 1950s and 1960s with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and any refusal to stand and fight to prevent communism's spread anywhere as tantamount to a Munich-style act of appeasement. By 1965, when the Johnson administration committed ground combat units to the Vietnam War, the U.S. doctrine of containment had been thoroughly militarized and extended beyond Europe to almost any country willing to ally itself with the United States. (As originally envisaged by George Kennan, containment entailed largely nonmilitary responses to a Soviet threat to Western Europe's industrial democracies regarded as predominantly political and psychological in nature.) Containment's universalization prompted Kennan's condemnation: "[W]e have made no mistake so fundamental in American foreign policy than concluding that a design suitable for Europe would also be suitable for those regions of the world that have just thrust off European rule, and that we failed to take into account how very different the underlying situation was in Asia and Africa." Unfortunately, those responsible for America's Vietnam intervention had come to believe that communist expansion anywhere, even in strategically remote areas against unsavory noncommunist dictatorships, threatened U.S. security.

The Munich analogy and its attendant domino theory heavily influenced official American thinking. Truman, Acheson, Eisenhower, Dulles, Johnson, and Rusk all believed that the Western democracies' accession in 1938 to Hitler's territorial demands on Czechoslovakia paved the way for World War II and proved that appeasing aggression simply invited more of it. They believed that totalitarian states, be they fascist or communist, were inherently and insatiably aggressive, and that, as such, they could be stopped or contained only by a collective resort to force--or at least a demonstrated willingness to fight--on the part of their intended victims.

They further subscribed, at least with respect to post-World War II Asia, to the domino principle, which held that the loss to communism of a single Southeast Asian country, be it French Indochina before the 1954 Geneva Conference or the Republic of (South) Vietnam after the conference, would inexorably lead to communist control of the rest of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia. After all, did not Hitler pursue an agenda of inexorable aggression from the Rhineland to the Austrian Anschluss to the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia proper to Poland and then on to the rest of Europe? Did not the road to Pearl Harbor and Bataan start with unchecked Japanese aggression in Manchuria?

Fear of falling dominoes was certainly pervasive among U.S. civilian and military officials working in Vietnam. Shortly after my arrival in Vietnam, I was lectured by my nominal Mekong Delta regional boss, an Air Force lieutenant colonel named Beaulieu, on just how extensive the domino effect would be if the United States gave up in Indochina. Colonel Beaulieu, whom I learned immediately after our first meeting was Elvis Presley's father-in-law (the pictures of "The Pelvis" and Priscilla ornamenting Beaulieu's office should have been a hint), declared that the dominoes extended all the way to Europe. "Once Vietnam falls," he said, "so will Southeast Asia, then India, Iran, and Turkey," though he could never define which communist powers would be involved in this great drive westward, or, for that matter, why anyone would wish to conquer and administer independent India.

The reasoning spawned by Munich was nowhere more cogently expressed than by Truman in a 1951 radio address on the Korean War and U.S. policy in the Far East. He declared that the "Communists in the Kremlin are engaged in a monstrous conspiracy to stamp out freedom all over the world," adding that, "It is easier to put out a fire in the beginning when it is small than after it has become a roaring blaze. And the best way to meet the threat of aggression is for the peace-loving nations to act together. If they don't act together, they are likely to be picked off one by one.... if the free countries of the world had acted together to crush the aggression of the [fascist] dictators [in the 1930s], there probably would have been no World War II. If history has taught us anything, it is that aggression anywhere in the world is a threat to peace everywhere in the world." Two years later, Eisenhower, who first publicly used the term "domino" on the eve of the French collapse in Indochina, warned that "if Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula would scarcely be defensible .... all India would be outflanked ... [and] how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked. It must be blocked now." Eisenhower subsequently appealed for British help in rescuing the French: "[W]e failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time," he wrote Prime Minister Churchill in 1954. "That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?"

Lyndon Johnson also saw Munich lurking in Indochina: "[E]verything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what [Neville] Chamberlain did.... I'd be giving a fat reward to aggression." For Dean Rusk the stakes in Vietnam were nothing short of another global conflict. The "overriding problem before us in Southeast Asia was ... how to prevent World War III. The principal lesson I learned from World War II was that if aggression is allowed to gather momentum, it can continue to build and lead to general war."

I myself was directly exposed to the Munich analogy's hold on even low-level American officialdom in the summer of 1967 at the Foreign Service Institute's Vietnam Training Center, which I attended for eight months prior to my participation in the U.S. pacification effort in Vietnam under the auspices of the Civil Operations for Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) organization. At the center, located in Arlington, Virginia, my classmates and I received intensive instruction in Vietnamese history, culture, and language as well as U.S. policy in Indochina. "What is frightening," I noted in a diary I kept throughout my Vietnam service, "are the talks given by political officers from the State Department. The theme has become routine. Inevitably, each lecture begins with Munich and ends in Vietnam without dropping a single political stitch along the way. The pre-World War II conditions and environment of Europe are unquestionably accepted as being almost entirely relevant to present-day Indochina. The sadistic Nazi jackboots of the Nuremberg rallies are the precursors of the Asian communist guerrillas. Industrial, white, advanced Europe equals backward, nonwhite, rural Asia; Ho equals Himmler; the Viet Cong equal the blackshirts. South Vietnam has become Czechoslovakia, and the antiwar peaceniks are equated with Neville Chamberlain's `peace in our time.'"

The Munich analogy presupposed not only aggression pursued relentlessly on behalf of extensive, even unlimited, imperial ambitions, but also an availability of resources sufficient to act upon those ambitions. Nazi Germany and post-1945 Soviet Russia had both, though Stalin and his successors pursued their imperial ambitions with a great deal more patience and caution than Hitler pursued his.

The Munich analogy's corollary domino principle presupposed a relative homogeneity in vulnerability to takeover (absent external assistance) of aggression's intended victims. (Dominoes' physical characteristics and obedience to the law of gravity render them all virtually identical.) Nazi Germany was a great power bent on dominating the Eurasian land mass, and until 1941 it faced no adversary capable of effectively resisting the force of German arms on the Continent; the Czech, Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Belgian, Dutch, and even French dominoes toppled quickly when tapped by Hitler's legions. Soviet Russia supplanted Germany as Eurasia's principal hegemon, and faced no opponent other than the distant United States capable of containing Moscow's ambitions. Munich did in fact harbor lessons appropriate for dealing effectively with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

In Southeast Asia, however, Munich blinded rather than enlightened American officialdom. Policymakers' tendency to view events in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s through the prism of events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the very disaster memories of which today shape U.S. policy just as profoundly as did memories of Munich in Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia the United States was not dealing with the Soviet Union but rather a small, poor communist state. There was simply no analogy between Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, and between South Vietnam and the Sudetenland. As noted, the Asian communist dictator was not an instrument of Chinese expansionism. Nor did he harbor imperial ambitions outside of the boundaries of French Indochina, a piece of real estate of virtually no intrinsic value to the United States. North Vietnam was a small, impoverished state whose ultimate victory in Indochina toppled not a single additional Southeast Asian domino of any strategic consequence. (Hanoi's ability, having conquered South Vietnam, to dominate Cambodia and Laos was never in doubt, and after Laos's neutralization in 1962 no serious consideration was given to a direct U.S. defense of either country.) John F. Kennedy's characterization of South Vietnam as "the cornerstone of the Free World in Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike" whose loss to communism would threaten the security of "Burma, Thailand, India, Japan [and] the Philippines" was, quite simply, rubbish.

The rationale of last resort for those who plunged the United States into the Vietnam War was the perceived imperative of maintaining the integrity of U.S. defense commitments worldwide. The argument was as simple as it was specious: the United States was committed to defend South Vietnam from external aggression, and failure to honor that commitment would lessen confidence in U.S. commitments elsewhere, from Berlin to Seoul. It made little difference whether the commitment to South Vietnam's defense was wise or militarily sustainable; America's word was at stake. Dean Rusk summed up this line of reasoning in an interview with CBS Television News in 1965: "The fact is that we know we have a commitment. The South Vietnamese know we have a commitment. The Communist world knows we have a commitment. The rest of the world knows it. Now, this means that the integrity of the American commitment is at the heart of this problem. I believe that the integrity of the American commitment is the principal structure of peace throughout the world." Rusk then added that "if our allies or, more particularly, if our adversaries should discover that the American commitment is not worth anything, then the world would face dangers of which we have not yet dreamed."

Was the United States obligated to do what it did in Vietnam? Johnson administration officials paraded the SEATO Treaty of 1954 ad nauseam in public speeches and congressional testimony as the legal basis of the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam's defense. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who regarded the extension of U.S. defense guarantees to any and all willing countries, regardless of feasibility considerations, as an effective deterrent to communist aggression, had indeed conceived the treaty as providing the legal pretext for future U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. A pretext, however, is not an obligation. There was nothing in the treaty that enjoined a U.S. defense of South Vietnam; unlike the NATO treaty, which mandated immediate military reaction by the United States to an armed attack on any ally within the treaty area, SEATO required of each signatory only that it "meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes." The SEATO Treaty did not preclude the United States from entering the Vietnam War, but it certainly did not mandate intervention. It surely did not obligate an armed response to local insurgency, even a communist one. So testified Secretary of State Dulles in support of SEATO's ratification. "If there is a revolutionary movement in Vietnam ..., we would consult together [with other members of SEATO]. ... But we have no undertaking to put it down; all we have is an undertaking to consult together as to what to do about it."

No other member of SEATO felt obligated by the treaty to fight in South Vietnam, notwithstanding official U.S. portrayal of the war from its inception as a case of international aggression as clear cut as North Korea's invasion of South Korea and even as would be a Soviet attack on Western Europe. (Alone among SEATO members other than the United States, Australia contributed forces in size proportionally significant to its total armed forces. New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines all sent token contingents, the latter two countries in exchange for substantial U.S. military assistance. South Korea, not a SEATO member, provided substantial forces--two army divisions and a marine brigade--but only in exchange for hefty U.S. military assistance to Seoul and a pledge by the United States not to redeploy to Vietnam either of the two U.S. divisions stationed in Korea.) "The Asian [allies] were ready to fight to the last American," complained Clark Clifford, McNamara's successor as secretary of defense.

SEATO itself was a diplomatic bastard child, an Anglo-French sop to Dulles at Geneva, who opposed any negotiated settlement of the French-Indochina War that would leave the communists territory and a favorable military position, and who, failing that, futilely sought the formation of a Southeast Asian alliance as a prerequisite to any such settlement. Unlike NATO, which was a well-planned, regionally compact alliance with an integrated military command, SEATO was a hastily cobbled together collection of states lacking geographic integrity and any instrument of collective military action. It was a paper alliance. SEATO's most prominent members--the United States, France, Britain, Pakistan, Australia, and New Zealand--lay outside Southeast Asia; and of Southeast Asia's non-Indochinese states, only two--Thailand and the Philippines--were members; Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia refused to join. Even South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were included in SEATO only as so-called "protocol" states--i.e., states to which SEATO's protection was extended but which lacked any defense obligations to other SEATO members.

Leaving SEATO aside, however, by 1965 a U.S. defense commitment to Saigon of some magnitude was implicit in the mere fact that three successive American presidents and their official spokesmen had declared (however thoughtlessly) an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam to be a vital U.S. interest and accordingly had steadily increased investment in U.S. resources and prestige in South Vietnam. But this commitment was not inherently open-ended; it dictated neither large-scale U.S. ground combat intervention--and certainly not Americanization of the war--nor unconditional U.S. support of any and all political regimes in Saigon. In 1954, Eisenhower sent South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem a letter pledging U.S. support for the new government contingent on South Vietnam's ability to use U.S. economic and military assistance effectively and on Diem's implementation of political reforms. In 1961, then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, following a trip to South Vietnam, recommended a three-year military and economic aid program conditioned on South Vietnam's pledge and implementation of political reforms. Moreover, until 1965 presidents Kennedy and Johnson repeatedly stressed that the war was ultimately an indigenous fight, that the United States could--and would--assist the South Vietnamese in their struggle against communism, but that they themselves would have to shoulder the blood burden of the war. "We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers," Kennedy told Walter Cronkite in a 1963 television interview, "but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists." Johnson in September 1964 concurred: "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

The fact that within four years there were over five hundred thousand U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam simply reflects the combination of South Vietnamese military fecklessness and the Johnson administration's strategic recklessness. No treaty or presidential pronouncement morally, politically, or legally committed the United States to this kind of intervention.

Nor did America's principal allies regard the United States's stand in Vietnam as a test of Washington's willingness to honor its defense commitments to them. The credibility of the U.S. commitment to Western Europe's defense had been repeatedly and convincingly demonstrated before 1965; Berliners, Englishmen, and even Charles De Gaulle did not need reassurance in distant Southeast Asia. Nor did the United States need to reassure South Koreans, Japanese, and Taiwanese. On the contrary, most of our allies regarded--and with good reason--America's deepening immersion in the Indochinese tar pit as a threat to Washington's ability to honor its commitments to them. To sustain, without a reserve call-up, a deployment of over five hundred thousand U.S. troops in Vietnam composed largely of draftees serving only one-year tours there, the Pentagon had to strip to the bone its forces deployed to Europe and withheld in the United States as a strategic reserve. By January 1968, the month North Korea seized the USS Pueblo and Hanoi launched the Tet Offensive, the strategic reserve contained only one combat ready division (the Eighty-second Airborne), and U.S. forces deployed in Europe and Northeast Asia were so enervated they could not perform their assigned missions. By that time, moreover, the post-World War II U.S. Army had been largely superseded by a conscript force.

This state of strategic bankruptcy was ultimately attributable to the ludicrously excessive significance American policymakers attached to events in Indochina, a significance which in turn derived from an American foreign policy that by the mid-1950s was no longer informed by reasoned judgment based on strategic discrimination and considerations of operational feasibility, but rather by a mindless anticommunism. Yet, if policymakers were wont to misread the importance of the war in Vietnam, they were no less inclined to misconstrue the nature of that war, and they were wont to do so in part to justify U.S. intervention in the first place. In April 1965, Hans Morgenthau, who believed that the war in Vietnam was essentially a civil conflict having no enduring strategic consequences for the United States, accused the Johnson administration of drawing "a most astounding conclusion" from its losing effort in Vietnam. "The United States," he said, citing the State Department's controversial February 1965 white paper, Aggression from the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam's Campaign to Conquer South Viet-Nam , "has decided to change the character of the war by a unilateral declaration from a South Vietnamese civil war to a war of `foreign aggression.'"

Perhaps no other issue has more bedeviled discussion of the Vietnam War than that of what kind of war it was. American officialdom insisted that the conflict was a case of international aggression waged conventionally, or at least subject to defeat by conventional U.S. military action. This view continues to be embraced by those who believe that the war was morally noble or at least militarily winnable. For example, Harry Summers asserts that the Vietnam War was "a conventional war" and that North Vietnam was "the source of aggression." Westmoreland agrees: "South Vietnam was not conquered by the guerrilla. It was conquered by the North Vietnamese army." Nixon: "We failed to understand that the war was an invasion from North Vietnam, not an insurgency in South Vietnam. North Vietnam shrewdly camouflaged its invasion to look like a civil war. But in fact the Vietnam War was the Korean War with jungles."

Conversely, those who believe that the war was unwinnable, or that the United States had no business in Vietnam anyway, claim, as did contemporary critics of U.S. intervention, that the conflict was essentially a civil war among Vietnamese who had been artificially and temporarily divided by the Cold War, and that it was unconventional, even revolutionary in character. Daniel Ellsberg has called it a "war of independence and a revolution." Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts have tagged Vietnam as "a civil war for national independence." The British counterinsurgency warfare expert, Sir Robert Thompson, writing in 1969, characterized the war as "basically an insurgency within South Vietnam boosted by infiltration, raids and an element of invasion from North Vietnam." In 1982, historian Theodore Draper, in a review of Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam , denounced the claim of foreign aggression because it "treats North Vietnam as if it were not inhabited by Vietnamese.... The control of the southern Vietcong by the North Vietnamese did not make either of them less Vietnamese."

How could a single war have so many perceived and contradictory faces? There has never been any doubt about the nature of World Wars I and II or the Korean War. One is tempted to conclude that simply the desire to make a lost war look retrospectively noble and winnable--or ignoble and doomed from the start--is enough to father whatever characterization is most appropriate.

A more satisfying answer, though not to those who insist that the war was either a Hitlerian act of external aggression or a pristine internal insurgency, is that the war was both civil and international, and both conventional and unconventional. It was civil in that it was waged predominantly by Vietnamese (on both sides of a Seventeenth Parallel that had no legal standing as an international border) to determine the future political control of southern Vietnam. It was international because it elicited massive direct U.S. military intervention and substantial Soviet and Chinese indirect intervention. It was conventional in the way it was fought on the battlefield by the United States throughout the war and occasionally by the Vietnamese communists, especially in 1968, 1972, and 1975. It was guerrilla in the way it was waged predominantly by North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front before--and for several years after--the Tet Offensive. It was also a total war for the communist side, whereas it was a limited war for the United States. It was total war against South Vietnam in that Hanoi wished to eliminate South Vietnam as an independent and noncommunist political entity, whereas the war the DRV waged against the United States was limited in that its objective was simply to compel U.S. withdrawal.

In these and other respects the Vietnam War bears a striking resemblance to the American War for Independence and the Spanish Civil War. The former was essentially a civil war among Englishmen over the political governance of British North America, though it elicited direct French intervention on behalf of the colonists in the form of credit, arms, Admiral de Grasse's fleet, and General Rochambeau's army that proved critical to the success of the American cause. It was waged according to the standards of European military convention by the British and sometimes by Washington's Continental Army, but waged unconventionally by American militia everywhere, Tory partisan forces in the southern colonies, and the Native American allies of both sides. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 was no less first and foremost a civil conflict--a war among Spaniards to determine who should govern Spain, though it too provoked substantial foreign intervention (Soviet on the Republican side, German and Italian on the fascist side). As in the American War for Independence, the war in Spain was waged both conventionally and unconventionally. Interestingly, external partisans of both Franco and the Republicans tended to assign to the Spanish Civil War, as did American policymakers to the Vietnam War, far greater strategic significance than the conflict warranted. By the 1930s, events in Spain had long ceased to have much influence beyond the Pyrenees, and fascism's ultimate victory in Spain contributed little to the subsequent fortunes of Nazi Germany. Franco proved as much of a Spanish nationalist as did Ho Chi Minh a Vietnamese nationalist; he was no more willing to place his country at Hitler's disposal (despite the German dictator's enormous pressure) than was Ho Chi Minh to serve as an imperial stalking horse for China--or was George Washington to serve as an agent of French Bourbon ambitions in the New World.

The Vietnam War simply could not be neatly fitted into the category of either foreign aggression or civil war, conventional conflict or guerrilla insurgency. Even if one chooses to label, inside Vietnam, the North Vietnamese as "foreigners" (was the movement of Union armies south of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1861-65 a case of foreign aggression?), the fact remains that at least until the Tet Offensive of 1968, the enemy's order of battle inside South Vietnam was dominated by indigenous southerners relying on locally acquired weapons. According to the State Department's own 1965 white paper, which sought to prove that the war in Vietnam was nothing more than a case of aggression from North Vietnam, of the total of 95,000 to 115,000 communist insurgents believed operating inside South Vietnam, only 20,000 were characterized as communist "officers, soldiers, and technicians ... known to have entered South Vietnam under orders from Hanoi." As additional proof of external aggression the white paper went on to list Chinese, Soviet, and Czech weapons captured from the insurgents. (Sixteen helmets and an undisclosed number of socks of North Vietnamese manufacture also were listed.) Yet the number of foreign recoilless rifles, mortars, rocket launchers, rifles, pistols, and submachine guns totaled 115--or an average of one weapon for every 826--1,000 estimated insurgents! In fact, communist forces in South Vietnam in 1965 were armed almost exclusively with weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or bribed from South Vietnamese army and security forces.

It was then--and remains today--highly misleading to assume sponsorship of an insurgency on the basis of insurgent weapons' country of manufacture. (American-made 105mm artillery pieces transferred from captured Nationalist Chinese forces by communist China to the Viet Minh proved critical to General Vo Nguyen Giap's 1954 victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu.) In the Vietnam War, almost all industrially manufactured weapons were of foreign make since neither North nor South Vietnam had an indigenous arms industry. In the coastal lower Mekong Delta, where I served immediately after the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong were equipped with weapons ranging from homemade booby traps to Chinese and Czech mortars and semiautomatic rifles. Main force VC (there were no PAVN units present) were armed with a combination of communist bloc and captured U.S. weapons, with local VC militia and self-defense forces relying almost exclusively on U.S. World War II-vintage M-1 rifles and M-2 carbines captured, stolen, or bought on the black market from South Vietnamese government forces. (The RVNAF did not begin receiving the U.S. M-16 rifle until 1969.) Also popular were World War I-vintage German Mauser bolt-action rifles, large stocks of which had been captured in Germany by Soviet forces in 1945. The Russians subsequently transferred them to the Chinese People's Liberation Army, which later turned them over to the Viet Minh during the French-Indochina War. Weapons of French and even Japanese manufacture also were discovered in VC arms caches, as were antivehicular mines, almost all of which were home-manufactured using dud U.S. bombs and artillery shells.

Not until after the Tet Offensive did North Vietnamese regulars, serving either in PAVN units or as fillers in depleted Viet Cong formations, come to dominate communist forces in the South. As late as December 1967, one month before the Tet Offensive was launched, Sir Robert Thompson estimated that North Vietnamese comprised only 60,000 of the 300,000 communist troops in the field, a figure in line with an August official U.S. estimate of 55,000 out of approximately 245,000.

To be sure, what began as a low-grade and militarily self-sustaining insurgency in the South had by 1975 evolved into a straightforward conventional North Vietnamese attempt to take over the remaining noncommunist areas of southern Vietnam. But the fact of communist conventionality in 1975 proves nothing about the character of the war in 1960 or 1965, and it was a grave error for American policymakers in the early to mid-1960s to dismiss the predominantly civil and unconventional nature of the conflict. The insistence by JCS Chairman Earl Wheeler and others that "the essence of the problem [in South Vietnam] is military" rather than "primarily political and economic" both served the Pentagon's desire to fight the only kind of war it really knew how to fight, and encouraged an aversion to dealing with the more difficult political challenges of the war. It also promoted an underestimation of enemy tenacity and willingness to sacrifice. By refusing to recognize or admit that the Vietnam War was from its inception primarily a civil war, and not part of a larger, centrally-directed international conspiracy, policymakers assumed that North Vietnam was, like the United States, waging a limited war, and therefore that it would be prepared to settle for something less than total victory (especially if confronted by military stalemate on the ground in the South and the threat of aerial bombardment of the North). In so making this assumption, policymakers not only ignored two millennia of Vietnamese history, but also excused themselves from confronting the harsh truth that civil wars are, for their indigenous participants, total wars, and that no foreign participant in someone else's civil war can possibly have as great a stake in the conflict's outcome--and attendant willingness to sacrifice--as do the indigenous parties involved.

It was unfortunate enough that policymakers attached excessive strategic significance to the Vietnam War and that they failed to recognize the character of the conflict primarily for what it was. But by failing to understand the asymmetry of commitment between the United States and the Vietnamese communists, they paved the way for committing the most egregious error a country going to war can make: underestimating the adversary's capacity to prevail while overestimating one's own.

Introduction
List of Abbreviations
The Reasons Why	p. 1
Stakes, Stamina, and Fighting Power	p. 29
The War in the South	p. 60
The War against the North	p. 101
Hollow Client	p. 122
The War along the Potomac	p. 141
Lost Victory?	p. 170
Notes	p. 185
Works Cited	p. 199
Index	p. 209
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The Wrong War

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