derestimation of the tenacity and willingness of its communist adversaries to withstand brutal punishment; and 4. declining support for the war in the United States.
Although the United States government placed some unnecessary constraints on the American military in Vietnam, it is doubtful whether they had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. The United States suffered a crushing military as well as political defeat in Vietnam.
American Policy Objectives in Vietnam
Von Clausewitz said that war is "a continuation of political activity by other means" (Howard & Paret 87 and 605). American administrations from Harry Truman to Gerald Ford deemed it essential to prevent communist domination of Southeast Asia. As President Dwight Eisenhower expressed the basis for American concern over the drive of the Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to unify Vietnam by force if necessary: "if someone sets up a row of dominoes, and knocks over the first one . . . it is certain that the last one will go over very quickly" (Brown 230).
During the last five years of the French Indochina War (1946-1954), the United States supported France indirectly with economic and military aid which by 1950 accounted for nearly 80 percent of the cost of the war (Karnow 192). However, Eisenhower did not regard the American interest in Vietnam to be sufficient to warrant its direct military intervention, which he vetoed when the French faced defeat by the Vietminh at Dienbienphu. At the July 1954 Geneva Conference the great powers partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel. For the next seven years, the United States sponsored and subsidized the non-communist South Vietnamese government led by President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Following instructions issued in January 1959 by the Central Committee in Hanoi for Southern revolutionary cadres to use force against the Diem government, the South Vietnamese countryside erupted in a guerrilla wa...