Good lord what a bunch of hooey-ified revisionist crap. Do you think the South would have won the Civil War too if only.....
Let's look at the real history of the situation.
Vietnam was a single country for years prior the arrival of the French. During WWII, our OSS worked closely with Ho Chi Minh -- a Nationalist -- in fighting the Japanese, and believed he was the future of a post war independent Vietnam.
When the war ended, we agreed to allow the French to reclaim their overseas territories, including French Indochina, in exchange for French support of US post war policy like the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. This included Vietnam.
Ho and his forces responded with a guerrilla war against the French that we funded. After the French lost, decisively, we agreed to a treaty and held elections in which the US promised to honor the winner as the new nationwide (North and South) leader of Vietnam. Ho won decisively. Since this was at the height of the Cold War, and Ho was a "Communist" - he wasn't really, more of an opportunistic Nationalist -- we could not tolerate that and installed a puppet regime in South Vietnam that was entirely unpopular and completely dependent on US support to stay in power.
After that regime fell to a coup, the "government" of South Vietnam from 1962 forward was effectively a military dictatorship. It was supported by several hundred thousand US soldiers on the ground, and by the US Air Force.
Were the US and South Vietnam "winning" in 1972? Arguable I guess. After nearly two decades of war, everyone was exhausted. The North Vietnamese. The South. The US. What existed was effectively a stalemate, that would have required a continued US military prescence on the ground to sustain. The political climate in the US would not permit this, no matter what the President promised in a Treaty.
So when the North violated the Treaty by providing more than just material aid to the Viet Cong, the US was faced with a choice -- reinsert ground troops or not.
Note that Professor Dickinmouth is wrong. It wasn't the election of 1974 and "Democrats" that stopped this. In fact, in 1973, the Senate and later Congress, with broad bipartisan support, passed the Case-Church Amendment that effectively prevented the PResident from unilaterally conducting war in Vietnam without Congressional approval. Professor Dickinmount conveniently omits this key fact.
In any event, the South was doomed from the start without US military on the ground to support it. The US PUBLIC -- not Congress, the PUBLIC -- would no longer stand for that. That ended the War, that and the South's inability to defend itself without major US support.
The Orwellian rewriting of history -- wars that were lost were actually WON except for the actions of the opposing political party - is about as dangerous as it gets.
