War Objectives

US Aims:

[a] To protect US reputation as a counter-subversive guarantor

[b] To avoid domino effect especially in Southeast Asia

[c] To keep South Vietnamese territory from red hands

[d] To merge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods

John MccNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, to Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, April 16, 1964

Words of Warning

“The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Cong or even force them to the conference table on our terms, no matter how many hundred thousand white, foreign [US] troops we deploy.”

“The alternative – no matter what we may wish it to be – is almost certainly a protracted war involving an open-ended commitment of US forces, mounting US casualties, no assurance of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road.”

Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot – without national humiliation – stop short of achieving complete objectives. Of the two possibilities, I think humiliation would be more likely that the achievement of our objectives even after we have paid terrible costs.”

George Ball, Under Secretary of State, memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson, July 1, 1965

“Let us face the fact that there are no really attractive options open to us. We should concentrate our attention on cutting our losses.”

George Ball, Under Secretary of State, memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson, April 9, 1966

General Concedes Failure in Baghdad
Bush Acknowledges Comparison to '68 Tet Offensive in Vietnam

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/20/MNGJ9LT21H1.DTL

In a confluence of grim official assessments of the war in Iraq, President Bush acknowledged that sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad could be compared to the Viet Cong's 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, and one of the top U.S. generals said the American military's two-month drive to crush the spiraling violence in the Iraqi capital had failed.

Such downbeat opinions, accompanied by reports of alarmingly high American casualties and unabated violence in Iraq, indicate that U.S. officials at the highest levels are rethinking the progress the United States is making in Iraq, experts said.

The increasing pessimism among serious analysts of the conflict is beginning to have an effect," said White, a former government intelligence analyst. "Policy makers are beginning to, if not accept the ultimate conclusions, then at least the main thrust of it: that we're not getting better, that the Iraqi government isn't working, that the Iraqi security forces are not standing up the way we would like them to."