This article is revisionist history at it's best. Almost pure nonsense. And Vietnam was a war which should never have been fought by people who had no reason to fight it.

(Is it "evil" to tell a poor kid from the ghetto that he's a hero fighting world communism and saving his country for democracy when in reality he's fighting a war because the President doesn't want to lose the next election, that he's not fighting world communism and that democracy in his country will go on no matter what happens in Vietnam? Let's say that kid trusts the government, and believes those lies. And he goes and gets killed. Is it "evil" to tell that to the kid who goes and dies? Was that death for a good cause?)

"The first Indochina War, between the colonial French and Communists headed by a man known to history as Ho Chi Minh, ended with the Geneva accords of 1954."

That portion of the "colonial war" after WWII was fought by French troops acting as proxies for Americans. They were paid by America, armed by America. France was in NO shape after WWII to be fighting that war then.

"Pending an improbable free election" South Vietnam with American connivance withdrew from the negotiated elections because they knew the North would win anything fair. The government of the south was regarded, correctly, as a puppet regime financed by Western powers, whereas the north was home-grown and nationalist.

(Over time one had to wonder why these people where fighting so hard. They had the crap pounded out of them over and over and over and still they kept coming back. They wanted to live, individually, and they didn't seem to care what the war cost them as a society. They would endure or be wiped out, with nothing in between. And anyone watching this had to be impressed with their sincerity, and start wondering about how rational this war was from the US point of view.

And on and on. It's interesting to read him blame Democrats and intellectuals. Kissinger was very influential on the home front, and Nixon fought that war longer than anyone else. (Both are Republicans, and Dr. Kissinger regards himself as an "intellectual".)

Kissinger regarded Vietnam the way Johnson did, as the first in a long line of dominos. The reality is that the Vietnamese were fighting for their homeland, and had fought against the Chinese, the French, and then the Americans. They didn't care about the Comintern or exporting communism, only about Vietnam.

Diem was corrupt and a friend of the Kennedy's. He had been a house guest of Old Man Kennedy, or Rose, and their common Roman Catholicism was a bond. Even so, Diem's arrogance finally led the south into a sort of civil war within a civil war, and he had to go. All that propped up any southern government in those days was the US, as it had been since WWII.

Nixon couldn't get out of the war any more than Johnson could, for the same reason. Neither wanted to be known as the first American President to lose a war. So, they kept throwing good money after bad, good lives after good lives. Just so they wouldn't be known as the first American President to lose a war.

And when Nixon bailed, which was sane, American abandoned many, many thousands of people it promised to take care of if they helped America. Abandoned them to a grim fate. People who had counted on America being an honorable country, to live up to it's word.

There's just too much to write about. The WSJ guy is nuts or misinformed, or both.

Arf