Yeah right, like the French would have been of any help. NOT!
No one ever suggested the froggies were THE commies in Vietnam, and I disagree that putting them back into Indochina was necessary to get them into NATO. I am also familiar with the history of the French war against the Viet Minh and the division of the country after their pull-out. Yes, we had advisors, in low level miltary training mission sort of way much as in many other countries, under Eisenhower.
The great increase in our involvement came after 1960 with Kennedy. During the '61-62 school year, one of my best friends had a Laotian foreign exchange student living with him, and we all learned far more than was ususal about the whole Indochinese situation at that time. The real road to intervention was paved when the Kennedy brothers of unhappy memory had the CIA and others get heavily involved in South Vietnamese internal politics, especially the coup against Diem. I remember it vividly at the time, and I remember reading the documents at length when the Pentagon Papers were published in the '70s.
I have alluded on other threads to MacArthur's plan to use a radiation belt along the Yalu, but I hardly think that that simpliciter disqualifies Dougout Doug (as his detractors called him) as a strategic thinker. Having read extensively in WWII and the MacArthur literature, my conclusions about MacArthur differ greatly from yours. And, as VMI man who greatly admires George C. Marshall, given the Marshall-MacArthur feud, I have to swallow my institutional pride to give Mac his due.
I was involved in some of the debates within the military community during the war about whether we ought to have been there and whether we were winning or losing at any given time. I know the arguments you're making, I agree that our ultimate failure was political, but I would also argue that the politics made the warfighting itself impossible. I still have no use for Westmoreland and the body count types, I have too many friends who didn't come back. I have a lot of respect for the men who fought the war at the squad, platoon, company, and even battalion level, but not much for the higher command levels, in the Army or the puzzle palace. I reserve my greatest contempt for the politicians, Hanoi Jane, and the cowards of the "New Left" whose personal fear of being drafted for cannon fodder led them to oppose the war.
I still think, based on everything I read, our involvement on the ground as we did it was a serious mistake, which almost destroyed the army -- you had to be on active duty in the mid-to-late '70s as I was to really appreciate how badly we were wounded -- and rent the country. We would have been much better off to have left Diem alone, let the Vietnamese fight their own war with training and supplies, maybe used some air to interdict the North, and let the chips fall where they might.