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The War In Vietnam Essay Research Paper

The War In Vietnam Essay, Research Paper


The War in Vietnam


Direct U.S. military participation in The Vietnam War, the nation’s


longest, cost fifty-eight thousand American lives. Only the Civil War and the


two world wars were deadlier for Americans. During the decade of Vietnam


beginning in 1964, the U.S Treasury spent over $140 billion on the war, enough


money to fund urban renewal projects in every major American city. Despite


these enormous costs and their accompanying public and private trauma for the


American people, the United States failed, for the first time in its history, to


achieve its stated war aims. The goal was to preserve a separate, independent,


noncommunist government in South Vietnam, but after April 1975, the communist


Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) ruled the entire nation.


The initial reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam seemed logical and


compelling to American leaders. Following its success in World War II, the


United States faced the future with a sense of moral rectitude and material


confidence. From Washington’s perspective, the principal threat to U.S.


security and world peace was monolithic, dictatorial communism emanating from he


Soviet Union. Any communist anywhere, at home or abroad, was, by definition,


and enemy of the United States. Drawing an analogy with the unsuccessful


appeasement of fascist dictators before World War II, the Truman administration


believed that any sign of communist aggression must be met quickly and


forcefully by the United States and its allies. This reactive policy was known


as containment.


In Vietnam the target of containment was Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh


front he had created in 1941. Ho and his chief lieutenants were communists with


long-standing connections to the Soviet Union. They were also ardent Vietnamese


nationalists who fought first to rid their country of the Japanese and then,


after 1945, to prevent France from reestablishing its former colonial mastery


over Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Harry S. Truman and other American


leaders, having no sympathy for French colonialism, favored Vietnamese


independence. But expanding communist control of Eastern Europe and the triumph


of the communists in China’s civil was made France’s war against Ho seem an


anticommunist rather than a colonialist effort. When France agreed to a quansi-


independent Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai as an alternative to Ho’s DRV, the


United States decided to support the French position.


The American conception of Vietnam as a cold war battleground largely


ignored the struggle for social justice and national sovereignty occurring


within the country. American attention focused primarily on Europe and on Asia


beyond Vietnam. Aid to France in Indochina was a quid pro quo for French


cooperation with America’s plans for the defense of Europe through the North


Atlantic Treaty Organization. After China became a communist state in 1949, the


stability of Japan became of paramount importance to Washington, and Japanese


development required access to the markets and raw materials of Southeast Asia.


The outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 served primarily to confirm Washington’s


belief that communist aggression posed a great danger to Asia . Subsequent


charges that Truman had “lost” China and had settled for a stalemate in Korea


caused succeeding presidents to fear the domestic political consequences if they


“lost” Vietnam. This apprehension, an overestimation of American power, and an


underestimation of Vietnamese communist strength locked all administrations from


1950 through the 1960s into a firm anticommunist stand in Vietnam.


Because American policy makers failed to appreciate the amount of effort


that would be required to exert influence on Vietnam’s political and social


structure, the course of American policy led to a steady escalation of U.S.


involvement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower increased the level of aide to the


French but continued to avoid military intervention, even when the French


experienced a devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954.


Following that battle, an international conference at Geneva, Switzerland,


arranged a cease-fire and provided for a North-South partition of Vietnam until


elections could be held. The United States was not a party to the Geneva


Agreements and began to foster the creation of a Vietnamese regime in South


Vietnam’s autocratic president Ngo Dinh Diem, who deposed Bao Dai in October


1955, resisted holding an election on the reunification of Vietnam. Despite


over $1 billion of U.S. aid between 1955 and 1961, the South Vietnamese economy


languished and internal security deteriorated. Nation building was failing the


South, and, in 1960, communist cadres created the National Liberation Front


(NLG) or Vietcong as its enemies called it, to challenge the Diem regime.


President John F. Kennedy concurred with his predecessor’s domino theory


and also believed that the credibility of U.S. anticommunist commitments around


the world was imperiled in 1961. Consequently, by 1963 he had tripled American


aid to South Vietnam and expanded the number of military advisers there from


less than seven hundred to more than sixteen thousand. But the Diem government


still failed to show economic or political progress. Buddhist priests,


spiritual leaders of the majority of Vietnamese, staged dramatic protests,


including self-immolation, against the dictatorship of the Cath

olic Diem. Ngo


Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother, led a brutal suppression of the Buddhist resistance.


Finally, after receiving assurances of noninterference from U.S. officials South


Vietnamese military officers conducted a coup that ended with the murders of


Diem and Nhu. Whether these gruesome developments would have led Kennedy to


redirect or decrease U.S. involvement in Vietnam is unknown, since Kennedy


himself was assassinated three weeks later.


Diem’s death left a leadership vacuum in South Vietnam, and the survival


of the Saigon regime was in jeopardy. With a presidential election approaching,


Lyndon B. Johnson did not want to be saddled with the charge of having lost


Vietnam. On the other hand, an expansion of U.S. responsibility for the war


against the Vietcong and North Vietnam would divert resources from Johnson’s


ambitious and expensive domestic program, the Great Society. A larger in


Vietnam also raised the risk of a military clash with China. Using as a


provocation alleged North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. Navy vessels in the Gulf of


Tonkin in August 1964, Johnson authorized limited bombing raids on North Vietnam


and secured a resolution from Congress allowing him to use military forces in


Vietnam. These actions helped Johnson win the November election, but they did


not dissuade the Vietcong from its relentless pressure against the Saigon


government.


By July 1965, Johnson faced the choice of being the first president to


lose a great war or of converting the Vietnamese War into a massive, U.S.


directed military effort. He chose a middle course that vastly escalated U.S.


involvement but that stopped short of an all-out application of American power.


Troop levels immediately jumped beyond 300,000 and by 1968 the number exceeded


500,000. Supporting these ground troops was a tremendous air bombardment of


North Vietnam that by 1967 surpassed the total tonnage dropped on Germany, Italy,


and Japan in World War II.


Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, pursued an


attrition strategy designed to inflict such heavy losses on the enemy that its


will to continue will be broken. By late 1967, his headquarters was claiming


that the crossover point had been reached and that enemy strength was being


destroyed faster than it could be replenished. But the communists’ Tet


offensive launched in January 1968 quickly extinguished the “light at the end of


the tunnel”. The Vietcong struck throughout South Vietnam, including a


penetration of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon. American and South


Vietnamese forces eventually repulsed the offensive and inflicted heavy losses


on the Vietcong, but the fighting had exposed the reality that a quick end of


the war was not in sight.


Following the Tet offensive, the American leaders began a slow and


agonizing reduction of U.S. involvement. Johnson limited the bombing, began


peace talks with Hanoi and the NLF, and withdrew as a candidate for reelection.


His successor, Richard M. Nixon, announced a program of Vietnamization, which


basically represented a return to the Eisenhower and Kennedy policies of helping


Vietnamese forces fight the war, Nixon gradually reduced U.S. ground troops in


Vietnam, but he increased the bombing; the tonnage dropped after 1969 exceeded


the already prodigious levels reached by Johnson. Nixon expanded air and ground


operations into Cambodia and Laos in attempts to block enemy supply routes along


Vietnam’s borders. He traveled to Moscow and Beijing for talks and sent his


aide Henry A. Kissinger to Paris for secret negotiations with the North


Vietnamese. In January 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed the


Paris Peace Agreement, which provided for the withdrawal of all remaining U.S.


forces from Vietnam, the return of U.S. prisoners of war, and a cease-fire.


The American troops and POWs came home, but the war continued. Nixon termed it


“peace with honor,” since a separate government remained in Saigon, but


Kissinger acknowledged that the arrangement provided primarily for a “decent


interval” between U.S. withdrawal and the collapse of the South. In April 1975,


North Vietnamese troops and tanks converged on Saigon, and the war was over.


Why did the United States lose the war? Some postmortems singled out


media criticism of the war and antiwar activism in America as undermining the


will of the U.S. government to continue fighting. Others cited the restrictions


placed by civilian politicians on the military’s operations or, conversely,


blamed U.S. military chiefs for not providing civilian leaders with a sound


strategy for victory. These so-called win arguments assume that victory was


possible, but they overlook the flawed reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.


Washington had sought to contain international communism, but this global


strategic concern masked the reality that the appeal of the communists in


Vietnam derived from local economic, social, and historical conditions. The U.S.


response to the Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military


solution to an internal political problem. America’s infliction of enormous


destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that


the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated


the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a


total war for their own and their cause’s survival. For the United States, it


was a limited wa

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