The Truth about the U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War - Research Paper Example

The Truth about the U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War Introduction It is the contention of this paper that the Vietnam War was agreeable or unavoidable for exactly the rationales that U.S. leaders during that moment claimed it was, that is, to sustain the trustworthiness and integrity of the pledge of Washington to restrain communism across the globe. The cream of the crop at the time were fully aware of the courses of action they were taking and had no alternative but to get involved in the war. Ho Chi Minh could barely have crushed the armed forces of France in the 1950s (Moyar 2006) or provoked the United States ten years after without firepower support from Beijing and Moscow. The Decision to Get Involved in the War The ideologies of Marxism-Leninism provided Mao Zedong, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, Ho a shared goal in pursuing revolutionary changes all over the world. Hence, the Cold War was “a world war… in which the future governance of the international system was at stake, and in which the great powers opposing the United States and its allies were the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany” (Moore & Turner 2002, 440). The war in Vietnam actually started because the USSR did not attempt to provoke the United States. Yet, in the less developed countries (LDCs), Moscow could hide its operations and still carry out its plans. The fame of Ho as a fervent supporter of independence, alongside Mao’s eagerness to support him, established Vietnam as an especially advantageous chance (Moore & Turner 2002). Therefore, this was a conflict that the Americans could barely have prevented, that is, to have stayed detached would have created a major pro-USSR repositioning in global politics. It is the argument of this paper that the Vietnam War is justified, yet it was dealt with in wrongly. Lyndon Johnson relied greatly on military commanders whose tactic of finding out and annihilating adversaries, rather than guaranteeing the safety of civilians, generated more fatalities than outcomes. As an obvious result, support from the Congress and the general public has weakened. Broadening the disagreement would simply have made everything more unpleasant, as, current Chinese documents reveal, Mao planned to get involved (Capps 1991). The sole possible option was for the Americans to give up the war, as stated by Jennings (2010), so as to sustain the American national political agreement in support of the Cold War. Triumph was not the issue. What was required was an attempt to prove that the Americans would protect and support its allies in the developing world, to guarantee prospective targets of the expansionist mission of Moscow that the U.S. would not leave them. However by persisting with the conflict until a total disintegration of national determination and a mortifying departure, the governments of Nixon and Ford promoted Soviet antagonism throughout the latter part of the 1970s (Neu 2005), a development repealed when Reagan reinstated the nation to a policy of rendering its dedications trustworthy once more. It is a well-known fact today that Ho, Mao, and Stalin rendezvous in 1950 in Moscow to formulate the line of attack for an ultimate occupation of Indochina (Jennings 2010). It is known that North Vietnam has better or larger support from China and USSR than assumed beforehand: the anti-aircraft squads of Russia in fact attacked American soldiers in Vietnam, and it was documented that there were roughly 170,000 combatants of China on its area (Moore & Turner 2002). It is known that the North Vietnamese were not at all actually solemn about an agreed resolution, and that their allegedly independent Viet Cong friends were actually their dummies. It has been recounted that South Vietnamese and Americans had no control over the exercise of bloodshed (Jennings 2010): The North Vietnamese were simply as awful, and the Khmer Rouge were obviously much more dreadful. Nevertheless, some historians failed to explain why the integrity of the United States was endangered in Vietnam. The Americans by no means declared its resolve to allow China, Cuba, or North Vietnam, from becoming Communists, and these failures generated no apparent pro-USSR repositioning in global politics (Neu 2005). It is difficult to envision how anyone could have perceived the integrity of the United States as being at risk in South Vietnam until representatives of the governments of Kennedy and Johnson, through their overlook of the distinction between important and secondary motives, rashly placed it there (Moyar 2006). Therefore, it is they themselves, not their opponents, who jeopardized the credibility of the country. As examples created by their forerunners indicate, it was an unnecessary act. It is even more difficult to imagine how the Americans, after joining and intensifying the war, could merely have gave it up past 1968 (Capps 1991). Some historians are recklessly ambiguous on what they imply by these points: (1) what would the character of the arrangement have been; and (2) How would hundreds of thousands of combatants have been pulled out? This is eloquently shown by the statement of Henry Kissinger: “We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead as if we were switching a television channel” (Capps 1991, 97). Several scholars have been successful in making integrity the highest national concern and afterwards, quite indifferently, discard it. These scholars appear not to understand its connection to eventuality, morals, geopolitics, capacity, or perspective. Conclusions Throughout the Vietnam War period and up until now the rationales behind the involvement of the United States in Vietnam are contentious and greatly debated. A particular fact regarding the intentions of the United States is that, by no means, were ever as obvious as the intentions of the Viet Cong. Nevertheless, it can be argued as well that the intentions of the U.S., though indefinite, simply varied on several points from those of Communist Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. Throughout the anti-communist period the U.S. decided to join the war merely because the administration believed it was the nation’s obligation as a global leader to make Communist Vietnam an exemplar for other countries that embraced communism. Although majority of the minor intentions of the U.S. could be directly explained by the mere actuality that the nation was at war, the rationale for proclaiming the war at first stays a theme of discourse, merely because of its contentious character. References Capps, W. The Vietnam Reader. New York: Routledge, 1991. Jennings, P. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2010. Moore, J. & R. Turner. The Real lessons of the Vietnam war: reflections twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon. The University of Michigan: Carolina Academic Press, 2002. Moyar, M. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Neu, C.E. America’s Lost War: Vietnam, 1945-1975. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2005. Read More