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Phillips contends that access by the press, and incorrect information fed to the US public, were not really issues. He is right, but he doesn't really explain why we did lose the Viet Nam war. Given the obvious similarities between the war in Afghanistan and the Viet Nam conflict, I felt it might be important to explain just why we did lose in Viet Nam. Phillips summarizes it as the fact that "cost of winning was more than we were willing pay." That's true. War is an activity where politicians decide that a political goal cannot be accomplished by diplomacy; the politicians then assign generals and their troops to use other means. The proper division of labor is then for politicians to set objectives and for generals to figure out how to achieve them (and for lesser ranks and soldiers to carry out the resulting operations). Ideally, the generals will be given goals that they are capable of achieving without cooperation of the other side. In other words, they will be goals which the generals can accomplish despite the best efforts of the other side to resist. That's exactly what wasn't done in Viet Nam; we weren't fighting to win, we were fighting to maintain a stalemate. The war could only be "won" by our side if the other side tired and gave up; as long as that didn't happen, as long as they didn't cooperate, then the war would continue. Eventually we tired and gave up, pulled out with a face-saving diplomatic solution that North Vietnam proceeded to ignore, and the war was lost. The stalemate was that we were trying to preserve the status quo. We wanted to keep South Vietnam in existence. We did bomb North Vietnam quite extensively, but the purpose of that bombing was entirely to convince the North that the price of continuing the war was too high, so that they would give up and stop attacking the South. What our generals didn't have was any kind of achievable objective which would win even if the North didn't give up. For example, they were forbidden to invade North Vietnam. If they'd been permitted to do that, they may well have won, and united Vietnam under a friendly government based in Saigon. And by so doing, they might have set off World War III. That was the problem. There was a certain degree of violence in that region which the USSR would tolerate, but an invasion of North Vietnam might have caused Soviet troops to get directly involved. Equally, North Vietnam was allied with China, and the memory of Korea was only too fresh in the mind. After Inchon, when the Americans (and allies) had broken out of the Pusan pocket and pushed the North Korean forces into a pocket of their own in the North, China intervened and reinforced the North with huge numbers of Chinese troops. North Vietnam also bordered China and there was definitely a threat of the same thing happening there if the US were to invade North Vietnam. Vietnam was not actually a separate war. It was part of the Cold War, and both sides in the Cold War recognized that the danger was too great if forces from both sides actually engaged in direct combat with each other. The combat in the Cold War was fought as a series of proxy wars, where one side or the other (or sometimes both) were represented by local troops in the zone of conflict. There was only one case in the Cold War where the US and USSR directly faced each other (the Cuba missile crisis) and it nearly did result in a nuclear exchange. All of the USSR, US and China recognized that direct field combat between them could result in catastrophe. So no-one was willing to take the chance of that happening. An invasion of the North by US forces would have been too risky; it could have set off a nuclear exchange. And if that was too risky, certainly direct attacks with nukes would have been far worse. If we had nuked Hanoi, that probably would have set off a nuclear exhange with the USSR. The only goal that US politicians could set to win in Vietnam was to outlast the North. Once it became clear that this was not possible, then it was only a matter of time before we gave up. The turning point was the Tet Offensive, a brilliant move by Ho Chi Minh which unquestionably won the war. Interestingly, on a tactical level it was a complete failure. All the objectives it took were recaptured by our side within a month, and they lost far more casualties than we did. But the generals and politicians had been saying that there was "light at the end of the tunnel" and the voters in the US had been believing that it would be possible to eventually cause the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to give up. After Tet, Johnson announced that he would not run again, and Nixon was elected on the platform of "Peace with Honor", which amounted to a signal to the North that the US was tired of the war and wanted out. In a sense, it's not clear that the US could have won in Vietnam. In a different sense, it tu 
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