Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Eclogite

An accurate post, that can be made - I think - more accurate if you add the rider "but the US did prolong the war, arguably unecessarily".

I believe this is the consensus among genuine historians (as opposed to political ideologs on either side, who alternately view the Vietnam war as an example of wanton US aggression catastrophically failed, or heroic altruism spectacularly successful - I’ve actually met people who seriously claim that the US won the war, and account of the 1975 fall of Saigon story is an invention of “the left-wing media”).

One of my favorite analyses of the necessity or lack of necessity of the Vietnam war is in Shelby L. Stanton’s 1985 “The Rise and Fall of an American Army”, which I understand was required reading at the US military colleges in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Based on interviews with US intelligence analysts and leaders, Stanton’s conclusion was that US policy makers believed that a US withdrawal from then South Vietnam would result in the effective annexation of Vietnam by China, but that later, as the US diplomatic relationship with China improved, it was learned that this was never seriously considered by the Chinese government. In short, he concludes that the major justification for the war was an honest, but tragic intelligence error.