nationalism; it had earned the title by dint of hard and long fighting. We could not see the affairs of Vietnam as they really were, mired as we were in prejudices generated by our own domestic politics. Rhetoric, repeated by Foster Dulles, emphasized that Vietnam was part of the larger struggle with China. We did not pause to understand why a peasant army had defeated a powerful Western army. Anyone who tried to talk about why the other side had won was vulnerable to charges of being soft on Communism. We had to see the struggle in Vietnam through the prism of the Cold War and had, in effect,
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