>Your memory is right. I had, actually, always assumed that the US
>would win the war for simple power reasons, just as it wins every
>war. That is, win the war in terms of its actual aims, even if not
>its maximal ones. The actual aims, which were always pretty clear I
>thought and could hardly be denied after the Pentagon Papers came
>out, were to prevent the "virus"-"rotten apple" effect of successful
>independent development, which might inspire independence movements
>in neighboring countries, perhaps spreading to Indonesia -- the
>major concern, for obvious reasons -- and leading Japan to
>"accommodate" to Asia, restoring the New Order, to which the US had
>no objection as long was it was under US control; but it wouldn't be
>in this case. So the stakes were large; the US was not prepared to
>lose World War II in the Pacific a few years after it ended.
>
>To frighten the public, this was presented as "the domino theory":
>Ho Chi Minh is going to get into a canoe, paddle to San Francisco,
>and rape your grandmother. But Eisenhower, the Kennedy planners,
>and others were not imbeciles. The rational version of the domino
>theory was plausible, and almost always underlies US intervention in
>the 3rd world, in earlier years under Cold War pretexts.
>
>To win the war, then, the US had to demolish Vietnam sufficiently so
>that it would never be a model for anyone -- like Cuba, Nicaragua,
>Guatemala, and a host of others. I always assumed that that would
>happen, though I played it down in speaking and writing because one
>cannot be sure and that message would have undermined opposition to
>the war. By 1967, just before his death, Bernard Fall, the most
>serious of the Indochina experts (and a hawk), warned that it had
>already happened and that Vietnam might not even survive as a viable
>entity. By 1969, after the post-Tet pacification campaigns, it was
>not in doubt and I began to write about it a little (At War with
>Asia, 1970; For Reasons of State, 1973 -- now with new evidence from
>the PP). By 1973 the Far Eastern Economic Review also chimed in,
>telling the US to lay off and stop wasting resources and
>international image now that it had won the war. I suspect that the
>"wise men" from Wall St, etc., had been telling them that since they
>told LBJ to get lost in 1968. Ed Herman and I have brought this up
>repeatedly in later years. The subsequent harsh punishment of
>Vietnam was in part motivated by the need to drive the last nail in
>the coffin, as it has done. In part it was presumably just savage
>revenge for daring to stand up to the master.
>
>True, by the standard of jingoist fanatics for whom anything but
>total victory, even if meaningless, is an intolerable insult and
>disaster, the US lost the war. That seems to include something
>approaching 100% of the intellectual class, but for them the
>characterization is accurate, and normal, not just here.