This thesis draws on diplomatic and clandestine archival sources to examine the interplay between population centric counterinsurgency operations and competent manoeuvring in complex sectarian political environments.
This thesis studies Edward Lansdale’s activities in South Vietnam from 1954-56 in order to demonstrate Lansdale’s ideas in action. Though Lansdale was instrumental in promoting the ideas of Galula, he was also critical of them as Lansdale’s ideas about counterinsurgency differed from Galula’s. Galula’s writings were first promoted during the 1960s by an American counterinsurgency expert, Edward Geary Lansdale. The United States sought to establish democracy in South Vietnam placing all of their faith in Ngo Dinh Diem, dismissing the possibility of any other leader though there were other viable candidates, but this choice of backing Diem and dismissing others was a resultof politics more than it was based on race and religion.Įdward Lansdale and the Saigon Military Mission: Counterinsurgency and Nation Building in South Vietnam, 1954-1956 Brendan Kelly Abstract: The work of David Galula has served as a basis for modern US counterinsurgency doctrine. This paper examines the arguments regarding race and religion as well as the viability of other leaders and concludes that, while race and religion played an instrumental role in general policy decision-making in Asia, the importance of retaining democracy in Asia as a countermeasure to the Soviet bloc was of the utmost concern. But, Scott Laderman and Seth Jacobs argue the United States’ decision to back Diem was connected to conceptions of race and religion and further argue that other, more capable, men were available and forwarded as alternatives.
State Department has consistently stated that there were no other alternatives, thus historians have explained the choice of Diem as the only possibility. To this end, the United States, and to a lesser degree, the French tried to support the leadership of Premiere Ngo Dinh Diem as the best hope for democratic nation building. Leading up to the decision to support the Diem regime, the Geneva Accords which formally ended the First Indochina War, hostilities undertaken by France intending to retain their colonial hold on Indochina, temporarily divided an independent Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, allowing the United States the opportunity to create and attempt to sustain a democracy in Indochina. This single decision has been deemed the decisive factor in the American loss in Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration’s formal backing of Ngo Dinh Diem has been a source of criticism in the attempts to lay blame for the United States’ failures in the Vietnam War.
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