Again, you have a very hard time keeping track of the point being argued. The original point had to do with US bungling the war in Vietnam by failing to instill an effective counterinsurgency strategy. Counterinsurgency has to be waged from the perspective of the population you are trying to win to your side of the war. Your or my viewpoint on what is best for them is entirely irrelevant. It is what they think is best for them that counts.
Let me quote your words back to you:One of the problems with Vietnam was that socially, economically and politically we were not on the right side of the war.
I read "right" to mean morally superior. You appear to be parsing "right" to mean whatever floats the natives' boats at any given point in time, much as Clinton defines the word sex pretty flexibly. My mistake.
My main point wasn't even morality. It was that insurgencies, like non-insurgencies, are won by some combination of superior generalship, manpower resources and/or material, not by the support of the people. In the Orient, "the people" generally "support" whomever they think is going to be on the winning side, and it's a piecemeal kind of thing that has to do with avoiding getting killed in the here and now while the guerrillas are in control of your hometown rather than any abstract principles. For people in non-guerrilla controlled areas, it's a matter of avoiding reprisals when the guerrillas win. (Where the guerrillas appear to be losing, this scenario happens in reverse - non-guerrilla-controlled areas support the government to avoid future reprisals and guerrilla-controlled areas are filled with government spies and turncoats to forestall future government reprisals).
The North Vietnamese only managed to win when Uncle Sam cut off supplies to South Vietnam, even as the Soviets provided billions of dollars in new equipment to North Vietnam on credit. I think it's silly to say that we were on the wrong side of the war. We were on the right side of the war. The real problem is that the non-communists had poor military leadership. Nonetheless, we plugged the gap. By the time we left in the 72/73 time frame, communist guerrillas were a spent force. It was the regular NVA that crossed the border with tanks, Migs and artillery.
The biggest mistake we made - and the reason massive American intervention became necessary - was in our killing the single unifying figure in South Vietnam - the man who could hold his country together, Ngo Dinh Diem. We wanted a George Washington-like figure and Ngo Dinh Diem was all the South Vietnamese had. I think it's poetic justice that the moron who engineered his death, Kennedy, had his brains blown out a couple of weeks later. It's the least that could have happened to Kennedy, given the almost 60,000 GI's that went to their deaths after South Vietnam started unraveling, post-Ngo.