Ken,

Your knowledge of the history of US efforts in Nam far exceeds mine, but to be clear on the phases, when I talk 0-3 I am talking phases of insurgency, not the effort to deal with the insurgency. Mao's three phases with a zero phase added to the front end.

As you well know we were just as spun up in the late 50s and early 60s over Communist ideology as we are today over islamic ideology. 30 years from now it might be Scientology ideology. The only ideology I really concern myself with is US ideology, and as I have stated previously, I believe the bedrocks of that are our Declaration of Independence, the Bill of rights, and the rest of the constitution in that order. When we start worrying about the other guys ideology we start making bad decisions. When we abandon our own ideology, we make horrible decisions. We did both in Nam, and a dozen other places.

So, I don't want to get off track by focusing too much on what we actually did, the lessons learned being sought here are in terms of the over all environment at the time (populace, governance, outside parties, etc) how could we have approached the problem differently for better effect.

Clearly the people of Vietnam did not want French Governance re-imposed on them. Understand that at the time we were justifiably concerned about any expansion of Communism, but in retrospect that all seems a little silly. I suspect in a decade or two we will look back on countries that have adopted what we call 'extreme' aspects of Islam in their governance and look back on that as silly as well. Self Determination is core US ideology, and good phase 0 operations are about allowing populaces the right to self determine. Any place we have denied a populace that right in the name of US national interests it has created a problem, or at least a time-delayed problem that festers for years potentially before it manifests itself.

Getting off track, but it all relates back to my core tenants of staying true to our values as a nation, not forcing them on others, and being more proactive in phase 0 periods to be a champion of the principle of self determination for people everywhere.