Originally Posted by Txjake

LBJ was not a limp wrist, but it is well known that he wanted to focus on domestic issues like his war on poverty, but Vietnam and Korean issues distracted the nation from his agenda. LBJ escalated the war and then hamstrung it by insisting on having it micromanaged from DC, and without taking the war to North Vietnam. In essence, he constructed a no win situation, although most likely inadvertantly and through the council of the men who helped JFK get into the war.

LBJ had no stomach to do the right things: either withdraw or take the massive force of the US and destroy the north. He allowed the NVA and Chairman Ho Chi Minh pretty much kick his ass in the psyop war of the poitical press and popular opinion. We looked ineffective and brutish and they looked like the courageous defenders of the homeland, and it turned the tide of popular opinion in the US and Europe, when in effect, it was a shrewdly calculated ploy by the NV government to further their "liberation theology" and conquer the south. Ho was a master of the psyop rhetoric.

The psyop struggle also helped give rise to European groups like the Red Army Faction (Bader-Meinhoff) and other red groups who were swayed into self-righteous indignation regrading the "imperialist" aggression of the US. They neither understood or cared about the US "Domino Theory" of containment of Asian communism and assumed that we had nefarious agendas to peddle.

The world really was in a struggle between the communist and non communist sides then, and was supported by the US & USSR. The struggle continues but the communist side is diminished without the money and support of the USSR.