Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Military History Visualized" channel.

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  9. It was a failure of doctrine, as you say. And political decisions. The doctrine flowed from the strategy, which flowed from the political decisions, which flowed from the political goals, which were based on faulty assumptions and, really, a lack of historical knowledge of the Vietnamese people. Our first error was early in the Cold War, when we supported the French effort to re-impose colonial rule. (Yes, I’m aware of the major SNAFU at the end of WW2.) This was done under the guise of anti-communism, but it was just a cover for re-colonizing a fiercely independent people. There was a sincere policy of opposing communism that the French used for its own national interest. The thinking behind anti-communist policies solidified around “the Domino Theory”, meaning that if Vietnam fell to communism, so would its neighbors, etc., until all of Asia was dominated by the Soviet Union and China. This was a faulty assumption, as was the idea that Vietnam’s nationalist movement was wholly communist in nature and obedient to Moscow and Beijing. U.S. policy makers and politicians were ignorant of Vietnam’s thousand year history of fighting the Chinese and other invaders. They were unaware that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and a communist second. They did not know that the original armed nationalists, the Viet Minh, was a coalition of political groups fighting for independence. (VM later became the NVA in the north and the VC in the south). All of this ignorance led to U.S. politicians seeking a simple military solution to a complicated geo political problem that they didn’t fully understand. And that is the basic error. The war was unwinnable because the faulty goals were based on faulty assumptions. That is the cause of U.S. failure in SVN, not a socialist 5th column in the U.S.
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