The crazy thing about South Vietnam was that we already KNEW how to win that war and win the peace. We won the peace in Japan by giving over title to land to farmers, bringing in New Deal social engineers and restructuring Japanese big business to tolerate labor unions, just as in the United States in order to create the foundations of democracy. We knew that land reform in South Korea and Taiwan (land to the tiller) combined with teaching farmers how to get better yields resulted in farmers who not only supported capitalism but were budding small businessmen themselves. It was WELL KNOWN in official Washington circles that land reform was the way to win against Communism in South Vietnam.
Yet from the start, from 1965, the United States conducted the Vietnam War as if the farmers of Vietnam were the ENEMY, to be bombed and starved into submitting to a kleptocratic oligarchy. It was President Kennedy who initially approved Operation Ranch Hand, the systematic spraying of rice fields with Agent Orange (a mixture of 2-4-D and 2-4-5-T ) in order to destroy the rice crops of suspected Viet Cong sympathizers (any Vietnamese peasant not paying rent to a landlord) in order to create the capitalist version of Stalin's controlled famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. The idea was to impoverish "VC sympathizers and to force them into either "strategic hamlets" or the cities. And this policy was started well before 1965 under Kennedy.
And people today wonder why students with consciences on college campuses in the 1960s wanted the Viet Cong to win.
In other words, whoever was making policy for the Vietnam War seemed to be trying to prove that Communists could be defeated WITHOUT making any concessions to common people; without giving land to peasants and turning them into small farmers, but that victory could be achieved by sheer repression and that farmers in these nations who were not content to work for bare subsistence and pay rents without protest WERE in fact the enemy and deserved no quarter but deserved to be liquidated as a class just as Joseph Stalin believed that small farmers who DID own their own land (kulaks) needed to be liquidated as a class. It's the same policy that the US followed in Guatemala, where, when in 1962, the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz instituted a policy of land reform, of breaking up landed estates that included the banana plantations of United Fruit Corporation, which was a subsidiary of W.R. Grace, two of whose major stockholders included John Foster Dulles (Eisenhower's Secretary of State) and former CIA Director Allan Welsh Dulles, the US mounted a covert operation to overthrow the duly elected Arbenz Government that included training an army in neighboring Honduras on the grounds that the Arbenz Government was somehow "communist". Or American oil executives with companies such as Gulf, Texaco, SoCal. Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York, who acted in solidarity with British Petroleum to boycott Iranian oil when Mossadegh nationalized British Petroleum assets even though he offered compensation, thus forcing Mossadegh to turn to the USSR in order to justify a CIA operation to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the Shah.
In short, after the immediate postwar and Korean War period, US defense and intelligence policy seems to have passed from New Dealers into the hands of people we have come to call Paleo-conservatives and whose mindset is one people on this list have come to identify as Draken. They do not have anything resembling a mainstream following in American society at this time (their chief intellectual exponent is William F. Buckley) or even the following within the American business community that their intellectual progeny, the neo-Conservatives will gain beginning in the 1970s. But they are quietly making considerable headway with their argument that preserving the New Deal social contract within the United States will require a certain amount of hedging overseas and for Americans to have a constantly expanding middle class, inputs of cheap resources and labor will be required from other countries. Thus, the US must act to keep nations from going Communist and sequestering their labor and resources away from US corporations and protect governments that protect private property rights, foreign and domestic, according to this argument. That a nation such as Australia manages to pay living wages to organized banana workers and still grow bananas (and produce sugar) that Australian consumers can afford to buy is totally ignored.
This, basically was why the New Left so passionately wanted the US to lose in Vietnam. Because of what a US victory in Vietnam would vindicate.