Us And The Vietnam WarEssay Preview: Us And The Vietnam WarReport this essayDirect U.S. military participation in The Vietnam War, the nations 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 Washingtons 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 Chinas civil was what made Frances 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 Hos DRV, the United States decided to support the French position.
[…]
On Oct. 13, 1945, Ho was taken aside by French President François Mitterrand for failing to stop the advance of the French Army at Kachinh, about 60 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of the capital at Chittagong, and forced back on the southern front. When he was finally driven from that front, he was captured by NVA forces and tortured until he died on Aug. 12, 1948. He had also been killed by French tanks, artillery and machine guns. The French government accused Ho of involvement in the deaths of a dozen or more soldiers while it was in the process of establishing special camps for the prisoners of war before it moved to Soto as an alternative. Ho had previously been a regular prisoner-of-war in Ho Chi Minh.
[…]
On Sept. 19, the French government signed its own deal with Thailand to give Ho the right, in return for the French surrender at the war’s end, to take advantage of a military operation to overthrow Ho. In exchange, the U.S. signed a cease-fire agreement that took effect April 18, 1951 and sent Ho to the Soto army. In an act of military aggression over Vietnam, Soto government forces fired indiscriminately into an isolated village in western Soto, killing dozens of villagers and capturing more than 20 U.S. and British personnel.
[…]
The government of China later ordered the massacre at Nenghaya in Burma, a war zone where the government of Southeast Asian leader Mao Zedong and his loyalist, communist, U.S.-backed troops have been fighting for years. Sixty-six Vietnamese civilians were killed, and four more died in the ensuing fighting.
[…]
During the war and before the war, many of the United States’ closest allies were sympathetic to China’s cause, especially its Chinese President Hu Jintao, in a diplomatic capacity. A September 1945 article published in the newspaper of the Soto government in Kampuchea called the People’s Republic of China an ally of China’s. Among these allies were Washington’s Allies in Germany, Japan, Britain; the United States, France, Australia, and South Africa. The Soto government, however, had no such allies in the United States.
In the weeks following the war, the United Nations set up its Security Council in London to evaluate what it called the “chasing effect of anti-slavery legislation [on a region and its citizens] at a very rapid pace.” Sometime after the United States entered the war with a view to building China a prosperous and powerful ally, China offered up to $30 billion annually in aid to assist the United States if the United Nations were to continue negotiating the issue. Chinese officials refused, fearing that it might interfere with the United States’ own efforts at peace. In fact, China seemed to prefer to avoid military action — that is, to remain in an alliance with the United States.
[…]
Meanwhile, on July 26, 1945, two young Vietnamese girls under age five were held in Nai Ngam Hsin Jail after they had not been identified for more than a year. The two were from Paunisi, in southeast China’s southwest called “Dia Bo.” The girls were kidnapped as young as the eighth year of their schooling and tortured in overcrowded and dirty cells. The kidnappers, who claimed they were children from Paunisi, held the girls and their two younger sisters and tried to force
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 Americas 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 Washingtons 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 Vietnams 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 Vietnams 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 predecessors 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 Catholic Diem. Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diems 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.
Diems 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 Johnsons 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