142 "The American intervention was unlikely to succeed from the outset. American power could have destroyed Vietnam, but it was highly improbable that it could ever have engendered a stable anti-communist regime in South Vietnam. The Vietnamese social and political revolution had proceeded too far to be reversed or contained, although it was postponed at the price of enormous and ultimately unjustifiable suffering by the Indochinese people. South Vietnamese society was rent by too many cleavages — political, ethnic, regional, and class — to be susceptible to coherent reorganization imposed from Washington."
181 "By the early 1950s the bulk of the French Union Forces .. Would be composed of native Vietnamese."
182 "French policy effectively created a small class of indigenous bureaucratic collaborators and their hangers-on who were allowed to staff a relatively powerless state apparatus that had no jurisdiction over French citizens. … French methods of governance - economic exploitation and political subjugation — effectively precluded the evolution of a progressive liberal middle class in Vietnam and drove self-respecting patriotic Vietnamese towards conspiracy, intrigue, and terror."