The Vietnam War did not go the way it did by accident — the political establishment, dominated by members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) hamstrung the U.S. Armed Forces, preventing it from taking effective action to win the war. These protocols, which were only declassified 20 years after the war ended, are known as the “Rules of Engagement.”

James Perloff, in The Shadows of Power, summarizes the “Rules of Engagement”:

In Vietnam, as in Korea, extraordinary restrictions were placed on the U.S. military. These, known as the “rules of engagement,” were not declassified until 1985, when twenty-six pages in the Congressional Record were required to summarize them.

The Air Force was repeatedly refused permission to bomb those targets that the Joint Chiefs of Staff deemed most strategic.

U.S. troops were given a general order not to fire at the Vietcong until fired upon.

Vehicles more than two hundred yards off the Ho Chi Minh Trail could not be bombed. (Enemy supply trucks, forewarned of approaching U.S. planes, had only to temporarily divert off the trail to escape destruction.)

A North Vietnamese MIG could not be struck if spotted on a runway; only if airborne and showing hostile intent.

Surface-to-air missile sites could not be bombed while under construction; only after they became operational.

Enemy forces could not be pursued if they crossed into Laos or Cambodia. This gave the Communists a safe sanctuary just fifty miles from Saigon. Even the brief incursion into Cambodia that Richard Nixon authorized in 1970 was hamstrung by a variety of rules and regulations authored in Washington.

To learn more about the establishment’s efforts to prevent U.S. victory in Vietnam, read the following documents and articles: