The United States in Vietnam: A Study in Futility

Abstract

This article delineates in detail several of the more important reasons why the United States government has failed to gain its will in Vietnam. First attention is given to factors in Vietnam history, ancient and modern, that were totally ignored by United States policy-makers as they moved into that distant land. Then, Communist leadership of the Vietnamese revolution beginning in 1945 is pointed up, as is the larger peasant/intelligentsia alliance growing out of changes in the colonial period. In relation to American policy, the essential fact is that the "Communist takeover" in Vietnam occurred in 1945-1946, some four years before the United States joined the French in a righteous anti-Communist cru sade in Indochina. Today, with France having long removed herself from the scene, the United States continues against all historical reason to try to turn back the clock and destroy a revolution that happened to be Communist. Massive, in discriminate employment in Vietnam of the modern technology of death has not made up for faulty political thinking, and it has shamed America even in its own eyes.