ntry.
It would be hard to be sure now, with so much water having gone under the bridge, which position was true; and probably the truth lay somewhere in between, as it often does. However, the criticsÆ position tends to founder on the question of what motive the USA would have had for wanting to be in Vietnam at all. The only plausible motive was that it was part of a global U.S. Cold War policy of attempting to contain the Communist world, as Robert McNamara asserts that it was. However, if the U.S. merely wanted a bulwark against communism in Southeast Asia, there would have been much easier and safer ways to set one up.
After about six decades of fighting, in the 1970s Vietnam ended up unified, independent, and with Ho Chi Minh as its President. Would it not have been simpler and more humane to have allowed that to happen after World War Two, or during the Eisenhower administration? Of course, hindsight being clearer than foresight, that seems obvious now, but, as McNamara says, it was not obvious then or in the 1960s. It has been asked why Ho and Vietnam were not considered to be similar to Tito and Yugoslavia. McNamara says that they did not seem similar, that the US administration equated Ho instead with Fidel Castro. He comments on the irony of the
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