US Involvement In Vietnam

8 Key excerpts on "US Involvement In Vietnam"

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  Why Allies Rebel

  Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars

  • Barbara Elias(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 The USA in Vietnam The Vietnamese in the street is firmly convinced that the U.S. totally dominates the GVN [Government of South Vietnam] and dictates exactly what course shall be followed. However, the bitter and tragic truth is that the U.S. has been kept at such a distance from GVN circles and power that in joint councils or plans our views may be heard, some portions of our logic may be endorsed but with confrontations or matters that represent any truly revolutionary departure from existing GVN practices etc., we are light weights and presently do not possess the leverage or power to carry the day. —The Pentagon Papers Prior to Afghanistan and Iraq, Vietnam was criticized as a bothersome aberration in US military history – a long, miscalculated war against an impoverished but tenacious enemy. 1 In contrast to WWII, a war Kurt Vonnegut pronounced the US “fought for near-holy motives,” the justi- fication for Vietnam was more ambiguous. 2 As one US veteran confided, “I want it to have been worth something, and I can’t make myself believe that it was.” 3 When pressed for a justification for the US commitment in Vietnam, President Johnson often cited the geopolitical and moral obli- gation to contain communism and demonstrate US resolve to rescue an enfeebled anti-communist ally. In April 1965, Johnson claimed, “our objective is the independence of South Viet-Nam and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves – only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.” 4 But over the course of the expansive US intervention, Washington insistently pressed Saigon to reform, issuing over 100 specific high-level policy requests. In this chapter I analyze these requests and the key factors that affected the likelihood that South Vietnam would comply. In particular, I offer three primary findings explaining patterns of compliance with US requests by the GVN.

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  Four Decades On

  Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

  • Scott Laderman, Edwin A. Martini, Edwin A. Martini, Scott Laderman, Edwin A. Martini, Edwin A. Martini(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Viet Nam scarcely exists in American history or memory. “Vietnam,” on the other hand, has left an indelible imprint on American history and memory. Thus, for most Americans, Viet Nam is not so much a country in Southeast Asia as it is a cultural phenomenon of their creation. Indeed, one might argue that the most important historical lesson of the “Vietnam War” (more properly the Second Indochina War or the American War) is that for Americans the conflict had little to do with Viet Nam itself.1 Indo-china, rather, functioned as a site, one of many through a long history of intervention, in which the United States carried out the drives of its mili-tant national identity. American cultural imperatives drove the decision to intervene, the conduct of the war, and the torturous path to exit the country and come to grips with its shattering impact and legacy.2 For several years now, the historiography of the American War has been trending toward de-emphasizing the notion that the United States “had to” intervene in Indochina as part of the Cold War struggle against world communism. Fredrik Logevall, Mark Bradley, Kathryn Statler, and Andrew Preston, among other scholars, emphasize that rather than being driven into the conflict by the mandates of the Cold War, the United States chose to enter into the war, often despite warnings from allies. Just why it made that decision has not been so fully explored.3 Diplomatic historians tend to focus on individual decision makers, in-Walter L. Hixson CHAPTER 2 Viet Nam and “ Vietnam ” in American History and Memory WALTER L. HIXSON 45 cluding key figures in allied nations, but especially on U.S. national secu-rity elites and, above all, on President Lyndon Johnson. The obsessive focus on Johnson reflects the traditional top-down methodology of diplo-matic history as well as the subdiscipline’s focus on government docu-ments, to the exclusion of theoretical and cultural approaches.

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  States of Disorder

  Understanding State Failure and Intervention in the Periphery

  • Dan Halvorson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 United States' Intervention in South Vietnam, 1965 DOI: 10.4324/9781315610733-5

  This chapter examines the book’s second case study of US armed intervention in 1965 to prevent the state ‘collapse’ of South Vietnam. The Vietnam intervention took place in the postcolonial pattern of order and bipolar international system of the Cold War. The direct US combat intervention in Vietnam, beginning with air operations from February 1965, and with ground forces from July 1965, can be understood as a response to a normative threat to Washington’s expectations for international order in a sensitive strategic location. By early 1965, the impending collapse of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south of the country was a fundamental breach of Washington’s requirements for a stable, non-communist ‘free world’ order in the postcolonial periphery.

  The US identity narrative held that preponderant American power bestowed on Washington a special burden of responsibility to preserve a pluralistic liberal world order by containing communist expansion. Developments in Indochina in the 1960s were a direct challenge to the US responsibility for preserving freedom in the world and therefore to its ontological security needs. As mentioned in Chapter 3 , in the Cold War climate of zero-sum ideological and strategic bipolarity, international order requirements and the distribution of capabilities were tightly interlocked. The collapse of South Vietnam was considered by most policy-makers as a profound strategic risk in the tense early-1960s Cold War climate even though it presented no direct security threat to the United States. The domino analogy entrenched in 1954 by President Eisenhower placed great emphasis on the transmission of peripheral threats to the North Atlantic core (Snyder 1991

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  Secret Wars

  Covert Conflict in International Politics

  • Austin Carson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  For the Soviet Union, I rely on Soviet specialist Il’ia Gaiduk’s book on 192 CHAPTER 6 Overview and Escalation Context The defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 led to independence for the new states of Laos, Cambodia, and a partitioned North and South Vietnam. A decade of political consolidation by Ho Chi Minh’s communist government in Hanoi and the anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem government in Saigon followed. The impetus for the Vietnam War was a nascent insur-gency in South Vietnam.7 In response to questionable performance by the South Vietnamese army and the illegitimacy of Diem’s rule, US leaders gradually embraced an increasingly active combat role. Increased Ameri-can aid to South Vietnam for counterinsurgency operations started in 1961 in the Kennedy-approved Operation Farmgate air missions. Under Presi-dent Johnson, US leaders embraced an overt American ground counter-insurgency and bombing role in 1965, and the highly publicized, gradualist Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. Figure 6.1 identifies the local combat-ants, local conflict zone, external intervening powers, and relevant periph-eral zones. The existing conflict into which external powers intervened was within the borders of North and South Vietnam. The peripheral areas in-cluded neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Figure 6.2 highlights the two key scenarios for large-scale escalation: widening to all of Southeast Asia via Laos or Cambodia, or the emergence of direct combat between outside interveners. These peripheral areas were especially dangerous because of simmering civil wars within Laos and Cambodia. Moreover, both neighbors served as conduits for aid from North to South Vietnam, complicating strategic planning for both sides. Laos was the lynchpin. Its long border with North Soviet policy in Vietnam, which draws on primary materials accessible in the early 1990s but no longer available to researchers.

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  The Media and Peace

  From Vietnam to the 'War on Terror'

  • G. Spencer(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The Bush administration’s reaction to images of dead soldiers returning home is testimony to the historical influence of Vietnam and tells us about the tense relationship which often exists between the media and governments during times of war. As the first television news war, Vietnam also presents an important case study by which to assess the media’s role in relation to conflict and dis- putations about that conflict. The political background The Vietnam War developed as part of America’s obsession with the threat of communism and the politics of the Cold War. The possibility of North Vietnam annexing the South was seen by America as a major threat to other states in the region, as well as damaging to American geopolitical interests and its global position (Hall 2000: 13). As part of a stategy to contain the possible dangers of communism, American policy was concerned primarily with supporting the Saigon regime in South Vietnam and using this relationship as justification for prosecut- ing a military campaign against the North. The initial decision to commit forces to Vietnam, made by Kennedy at the beginning of the 1960s (and which occupied the administrations of Johnson and Nixon afterwards), was taken because it was believed that ‘A Victory by the Vietnamese communists would only encourage . . . revolutionary move- ments elsewhere in the world’, and provide ‘an advantage for the Soviets and Chinese’ (ibid: 10). Vietnam itself was therefore seen as important in the sense that ‘its control by a communist regime threatened all of Southeast Asia’ and ‘the economic needs of the Western alliance and Japan’ (ibid: 81). A military campaign was seen to be the most effective way to confront the communist threat, but proved to be a major mis- calculation in terms of America underestimating the communist resis- tance.

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  The Vietnam War and International Law, Volume 1

  • Richard A. Falk(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Western ideas—democracy and communism— clash in the minds of people whose cultures have been sapped by the intellectual imperialism of the West. It may therefore also be a United States policy to seek answers or palliatives to the problems of the South Vietnamese which have broader applications. 21 Whether or not such policy goals exist is unclear. Apart from "push- ing out the invader," the goal which the Memorandum stresses, empha- sis has been given lately to insuring "self-determination" by the South Vietnamese. Critics of United States policy quote different scripture for their faith in self-determination—either Wilsonian rhetoric, Bud- dhist demands for a referendum, or the ill-considered and obsolete 21. See Lansdale, Viet Nam: Do We Understand Revolution?, 43 FOREIGN AFFAIRS 75 (1964) which stresses the need for imaginative civilian action, to create conditions favor- able to a "true" (non-Communist) Vietnamese revolutionary cause. 358 LEGALITY OF AMERICAN MILITARY INVOLVEMENT provisions o£ the 1954 Geneva Accords—but all consider self-determi- nation (translated as determination by ballot) basic to a "decently ordered" society. Their demands have been accommodated in United States policy statements. American action is portrayed as an effort to secure self-determination for a harassed people, who otherwise would be denied its blessings. Unfortunately, no significant vote can be taken outside the urban areas of South Viet Nam, and the countryside, containing a popular majority, is controlled at least intermittently by the Viet Cong. A vote there, until Viet Cong control is broken, would be as unreliable a statement of opinion as the one-candidate elections of "people's democ- racies." To uproot the Viet Cong, the United States thus stumbles onto a platform of "enfranchisement by bombardment"—repellent to all who think about it.

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  Cracks in the Empire

  State Politics in the Vietnam War

  • Paul Joseph(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  Five Interpretations of U.S. Intervention 37 Hanoi could see the situation coming by the end of 1972. Their rear bases were really under attack and the South Vietnamese rear bases, at the same time, were in good shape. In my view, on December 30,1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area, you had won the war. It was over! They had fired 1,242 SAMs; they had none left, and what would come overland from China would be a mere trickle. They and their whole rear base at that point were at your mercy. They would have taken any terms. And that is why, of course, you actually got a peace agreement in January, which you had not been able to get in October. 57 Many conservatives worry about the impact of the Vietnam experience on American resolve to use military force in the future. Americans should not feel guilty about Vietnam Guenter Lewy asserts: To a large number of Americans the Vietnamese war represents not only a political mistake and national defeat but also a major moral failure. The catalog of evils with which the United States is burdened includes the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the assassination and torture of political ad-versaries, the terror-bombing of North Vietnam, duplicity about it all in high places and much else. For many younger people, in particular, America and Vietnam stands as the epitome of evil in the modern world; this view of the American role in Vietnam has contributed significantly to the impair-ment of national pride and self-confidence that has beset this country since the fall of Vietnam. . . . the sense of guilt created by the Vietnam war in the minds of many Americans is not warranted and the charges of officially condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct are without substance. Indeed, detailed examination of battle-field practices reveals that the loss of civilian life in Vietnam was less than in World War II and Korea and that concern with minimizing the ravages of war was strong.

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  Routledge Library Editions: Revolution in Vietnam

  • Various, Various Authors(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  According to this explanation, the US found itself involved in Vietnam as a result of decisions made incrementally, often as a 106 War and aftermath in Vietnam product of compromise within the bureaucracy. The goals that the administration were pursuing were not static but shifted over time. Moreover, while the decisionmaking process under Kennedy was flexible and open, that during his successor’s term of office was more restricted Two factors were of critical significance in bringing about the narrowing of the bounds of debate during LBJ’s administration. First was Johnson’s personality. Unable to brook criticism, he effectively restricted policy debates within his own narrowly defined parameters. Second was the role of Dean Rusk (Gallucci 1975:32–33). Secretary of State during the later years of the Kennedy administration and then for Johnson, Rusk’s handling of his department ensured that its contribution to the formulation of US foreign policy was severely curtailed, at least after 1963. Conditioned by memories of the Second World War, Rusk had an unquestioned belief in the need for America to exhibit its resolve and avoid appeasement at all costs. In addition, he had a heightened respect for military acumen and this led him to defer to military leaders when he should have been balancing their influence in policy formulation with a countervailing emphasis on a political and diplomatic approach to the conflict. Inevitably, the bureaucratic process malfunctioned because of this lack of balance, so leading to a progressively restricted arena of debate. The State Department became ineffective and inefficient and the centre of foreign policy formulation moved further into the hands of those advocating a military solution. Whether Rusk’s role was pivotal in bureaucratic politics and in the development of US Involvement In Vietnam is questionable. But other related aspects of the decisionmaking system certainly did have an impact upon America’s role in South East Asia.

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