As we have seen, U.S. involvement in El Salvador created a controversial and polarizing split between those who viewed the commitment as necessary and those who saw it as amoral and ineffectual; this split was further exacerbated with the assumption that a deeper involvement in El Salvador was inevitable. One less studied story of the Salvador Option is the role that “solidarity groups” – most saliently in the United States – played in influencing both the perception of what was occurring in El Salvador and how Washington should respond. Not surprisingly, many of the American activists opposing U.S. policies in El Salvador concluded from the Vietnam experience that those who spoke up, protested, and even engaged in civil disobedience would be vindicated by what could become an illegal and immoral war. So, in effect, the Vietnam solidarity playbook became the Salvador playbook.

Critics, on the other hand, believed that the lesson from Vietnam was how the North Vietnamese had won the propaganda war in American public opinion. They cited a North Vietnamese cadre who reflected on their efforts to influence the debate in America. “There were, as all political cadre learned by heart, three currents of revolution…in every people's war. The first two currents are the ever-growing international socialist camp and the armed liberation movement within the country in question.