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.

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