By mid-1965 the conflict had become an American war, a fact that Johnson and his advisers had consistently and successfully underplayed. U.S. involvement was to last until 1975.
Revisionist history consistently comes up with the same scapegoats for our defeat in Vietnam: left-wing, drugged-out, draft-dodging America-hating hippies, the New York Times, CBS, communist college teach-ins, Jane Fonda, flawed strategy, no backbone, radical liberals, on and on.
H. R. McMaster, an Army officer and combat veteran of the first Gulf War, offers a chilling study in his 1997 book, Derelection of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that led to Vietnam.
The disaster in Vietnam was not the result of impersonal forces but a uniquely human failure. The failings were many and reinforcing: arrogance, weakness, lying in pursuit of self-interest, and above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people.
Sounds like the very recent past in Iraq. . . . . .