The United States Was Right to Intervene In Vietnam

This coming April will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and though it had a tragic ending, the United States actually nearly won it.

So then, as some have suggested, was it a mistake for the U.S. to intervene in Vietnam? Not at all. Instead, the problem is not that we intervened, but how we intervened.

The 1960s: LBJ’s & McNamara’s Failures

In his 1999 book Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict, Michael Lind argues that the United States had to fight in Vietnam to prove that its word had meaning and that the allies could count on their American friends:

“It was necessary for the United States to escalate the war in the mid-1960s in order to defend the credibility of the United States as a superpower, but it was necessary for the United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts. Indochina was worth a war but only a limited war—and not the limited war that the United States actually fought.” 

The “credibility of the United States” part certainly has a lot of merit. After all, in the previous two decades after World War II ended, the U.S. abandoned the following allies to the ravages and conquests of the Communist jackboot: (1) the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949; (2) the Hungarian freedom fighters of 1956; and (3) the anti-Castro Cuban rebels during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 (when JFK refused air support to the anti-communist forces).

Meanwhile, in his autobiography First SEAL, Lieutenant Commander Roy Henry Boehm, the “godfather of the Navy SEALs,” although on the opposite end of the political-ideological spectrum from Lind, also criticizes Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) for turning the Vietnam War from a guerrilla war to one of conventional warfare.

Yet we still could have won the war in 1968!

Contrary to the claims of the likes of Walter Cronkite and his ilk, the Tet Offensive was actually a crushing defeat for the Viet Cong. Not only were the Viet Cong slaughtered by U.S. and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) defenses and counterattacks, but the Viet Cong also failed in their objective of fomenting a popular uprising among the South Vietnamese.

Consider these words from former Viet Cong senior official Trinh Duc: “First of all, casualties everywhere were very, very high, and the spirit of the soldiers dropped to a low point.” Or consider that former Viet Cong agent Duong Quynh Hoa bluntly denounced the mission as a “grievous miscalculation” by the Hanoi hierarchy. Even General Vo Nguyen Giap himself privately conceded that Tet was a stunning military defeat. 

But LBJ and Robert S. McNamara squandered this profound opportunity to finish the job. Instead, they mind-numbingly ordered bombing halts against the North, thus allowing the Communist foes to rebuild, recover, and regroup.

To make matters worse, LBJ and McNamara took a gradualistic approach to the fight instead of striking with maximum concentration, as summed up semantically in their administration’s official name for the air campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder. Indeed, the air war phase of the 1991 Persian Gulf War was named “Instant Thunder” to reflect the contrast in tactics and strategy gleaned from the painful lessons learned from Rolling Thunder.

The 1970s: Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Initial Successes and What Might Have Been

And yet in spite of the Johnson administration’s abysmal failures in prosecuting the conventional war effort in Vietnam, America still nearly won the war thanks to the more sensible approach taken by their successors, Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

This was most devastatingly demonstrated during Operation Linebacker II, the so-called “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor in December 1972 that utterly devastated strategic targets in North Vietnam and sent the North Vietnamese back to the peace table. Just consider the words of Sir Robert Thompson, the architect of the British victory in the Malayan Emergency anticommunist counterinsurgency campaign (1948-1960) who was generally critical of American war efforts: “In my view … you had won the war. It was over! … They and their whole rear base were at your mercy.”

The Tragic Aftermath

Alas, after Nixon was forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the follow-on presidential administration of Gerald R. Ford was too weak to stand up to the Democrat-controlled Congress as aid was cut to South Vietnam by 50 percent in consecutive years (1974 and 1975). This completely reversed the gains made at the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and left Saigon too weak to fend off the Communists’ final push to “reunite” North and South Vietnam.

About the Author: Christian D. Orr

Christian D. Orr is a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ). He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch, The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS).