The kind words of the Czar notwithstanding, your Volgi is decidedly not a historian of Southeast Asia or the Vietnam War. And he’s in agreement with the Czar’s argument, in general, though he’d quibble with the word futile, given that it implies pointlessness, but agree completely with, say, doomed, given the framework the Czar describes.

Also, he’d mention the Kennedy Administration’s too-clever and too-cold green-lighting of the 1962 ARVN generals’ coup d’état against President Ngô Đình Diệm which resulted in the latter’s assssination. In some respects, this was America’s initial and perhaps fatal mistake in Vietnam by permanently destabilizing—and delegitimizing—the government of South Vietnam, providing apparent (though untjustified) credence to the North’s (and the Soviets’) propaganda as the Republic of Vietnam as a U.S. puppet-state colony. The Kennedy Administration’s Cold War gamesmanship seems, at times, to have been too much game, too little statesmanship.

It also shows, as your Volgi has noted elsewhere (see the last ¶), what a dangerous ally the U.S. can—lamentably—be.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.