freedom. The South Vietnamese anti-communist leaders were dictators, not democrats, and had been allied with the wildly unpopular French, then with the Americans. In contrast, the National Liberation Front (NLF) or 'Viet Cong' (as it was called by the Americans) had deep, longstanding support in the Vietnamese countryside. American military decision-makers proved unable to process this fact, given that they viewed Vietnam through its own biases, not through the eyes of the Vietnamese. The method of America's military entry into Vietnam was also disastrous: Eisenhower and Kennedy's gradual increase of American advisors and military support enabled the public to ignore the gradual escalation, as well as America's political alliance with the unpopular anticommunist, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem (who was ultimately assassinated). The American public also did not understand...

The method of fighting the war was undertaken in an autocratic fashion. President Johnson never officially declared war in Vietnam, but the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress gave him unprecedented powers to manage and escalate American involvement.
The lesson to be learned in Vietnam is a lesson of specificity -- when entering into a military situation, it is essential to understand the ground war in the ideological terms of the combatants, and not merely see things through the perspective of the United States. Religious, racial, and ethnic tensions, as well as the history of the region must be understood. It was impossible to win a war and install a functional regime when the people of the land were opposed to such an arrangement.