Raamin Mostaghimi

3/28/07

AFP Section Writing

Kissinger’s "Vietnam: On the Road to Despair”

Kissinger’s analysis here has, contrary to your comments last section, captivated me once again. He looks at a completely different strategy that I found interesting- using Laos as a defense point for Southern Vietnam rather than South Vietnam itself. He makes the point that the Communists were treating the whole of Indochina as a single theater of war, while the Americans for some reason had separated them along the lines arbitrarily drawn to divide them into countries. Any strategic aim that Kennedy and Johnson were looking to accomplish would have been served equally well by fighting the North Vietnamese (and especially the Viet Cong) in Laos as in South Vietnam.

That the Kennedy administration was unwilling to sacrifice the ideological component of the war in this way for a purely strategic end really illustrates a point that Kissinger has been making throughout his analysis- that the United States has fought every war post-WWII with a handicap- ideology. The North Vietnamese could have been stopped and South Vietnam possibly secured without having to pit the US military against irregular guerilla forces with which it was not prepared to deal, but US prestige was at stake as soon as Johnson was sent over to the country. Had the US not fought with ideology and prestige on the line but rather as a soldier fights- like Eisenhower had suggested- it’s possible that the quagmire that Vietnam became could have been avoided entirely.