Vietnam War

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If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam... Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick it out for a little longer [than the French], but eventually they will have to quit too.
—Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, somehow managing to be saner than four presidents.[1]

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was a civil war of sorts, between the two states set up at the Geneva Conference to govern Vietnam following the French withdrawal from the area.

Contents

[edit] History

The Vietnam War began for each side at different points. In the Vietnamese view, both those north and south of the 17th parallel, it was a continuation of an anti-colonial struggle for autonomy and national republicanism dating back to 111 BCE. In the view of the West, it began effectively in 1963, when President Lyndon Johnson sent ground troops into the country following the (revealed to be "staged") Gulf of Tonkin incident.[2]

The French had begun colonialist trading in the late 18th century. After World War I, the Versailles Congress had ignored a nationalist named Ho Chi Minh, who petitioned to form a Vietnamese Republic. The French were assigned the territory, and colonialist government continued. Ho went to Russia and became involved in the anti-colonial efforts in the Communist International.[3] Dr. Paul Mus, however, who negotiated with Ho, made clear in interviews that Ho was less of a doctrinaire Leninist and more truly a Confucian in outlook, and his political and economic ideas merely were more complimented by Leninism because of the Vietnamese farming hamlet economy and social character.[4]

FDR made clear he was opposed to French colonialism returning to Asia, and both the Americans and British OSS funded Ho and his Viet Minh militias in the struggle against Japanese takeover of the Vichy French territories in Asia. However, by 1945, the Truman administration was laying groundwork for a larger Cold War, and the disarming of the Japanese in Asia became a major argument point. At Potsdam, the 17th Parallel was the decided demarcation point, with all area south of that line being de-militarized by the French and the North by the Kuomintang Chinese forces. The Nationalist Chinese were already being routed by Mao's Communists, and so the lack of government led Ho to asserting power as a patriot akin to George Washington.

On September 2, 1945, he declared the "Democratic Republic of Vietnam's" independence with the words "All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."[5] However, the French were far more interested in ideas surrounding the French economy than the French Enlightenment, and they asserted power in the South while Chiang Kai-shek's forces exiled Ho's government. The declaration of a Red China, however, led to a re-assertion of Ho's power and an alignment of global supply lines for both sides.

In American political parlance, the 'loss' of China to the Commies was blamed on the State Department, the Democrats, and secret Red sleeper cells in Washington. The McCarthy era highlighted the idea of Vietnam's role in the domino theory. As such, both Democrats and Republicans foisted another Red Scare on the US, and many experts on Asia were purged from the State Department. John F. Kennedy was a member of the American Friends of Vietnam, a group which essentially raised capital for puppet regimes the French were creating in the arbitrarily-partitioned country. It was agreed in 1954 at Geneva there would be a national ballot to unite the de-militarized nation under one government. However, because the CIA could not produce a reasonable contender to Ho, the South re-negged on the ballot and the US justified this in the name of the fight against Communism, installing the Roman Catholic CIA-backed party of Jean Baptiste Ngô Đình Diệm, who, in a family junta between himself, his military tactician brother, and his sister-in-law, essentially ruined the country. The regime was marked by multi-level corruption and stupidity, as well as repression of a Buddhist majority by a minority Catholic dictator who banned opposition parties. When a monk burned himself to death in 1962,[wp] the Kennedy administration instructed American military advisors to allow a coup against the family.

[edit] The clusterfuck

However, after Kennedy's death, Johnson reversed and began sending in troops. In response, the Southern Vietnamese formed their own pro-North militias, the Viet Cong, who executed guerilla actions and sabotage against the Americans and the CIA-backed government. As a result, the Johnson administration reverted to World War II tactics, including carpet bombings and the use of napalm. This did very little to stop a guerilla movement, as it was, and the war became a human rights disaster. Johnson refused to run for a second term, and Richard Nixon was elected.[6]

Nixon himself lied about a so-called "Secret Plan," and his abject failures in Vietnam directly led to the formation of The Plumbers, a covert and illegal faux-detective group Nixon put together to dig up dirt on his enemies, starting with Daniel Ellsberg. The period of Kissinger and Nixon was the most deadly for US soldiers.

The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated 1-2 million North and South Vietnamese,[7] 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians[8] and 30-50,000 Laotians.[9] The "most comprehensive demographic survey" ever conducted on casualties during the war, as endorsed by the Associated Press, estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.[10]

[edit] International reaction and perspectives

Due to the fact that what was essentially a civil war with a nationalist underpinning was understood in the context of Cold War ideological frameworks, much of the rest of the world was drawn into the war in some way. The anti-communist government of South Vietnam received assistance from the United States, South Korea, and Australia. The communist government of North Vietnam (which controlled the insurgents who had started the war) received assistance from the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China.

It was a lengthy, brutal war of attrition, characterized by heavy use of napalm and numerous atrocities committed by both sides. It was also the first war to be broadcast live into the homes of American television viewers, and (possibly as a result of this coverage) remains one of the most unpopular wars in United States history.

Though largely forgotten, Martin Luther King supported the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam; and condemned Americas actions in the war as colonialism. [11]

The U.S. withdrew its assistance in 1973, and the war eventually came to a close in 1975 with the North Vietnamese capture of Saigon and the unification of Vietnam into a single country controlled by the Communist government. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials favored such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers).[12] The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment. Operations spanned borders, with Laos and Cambodia heavily bombed. Involvement peaked in 1968 at the time of the Tet Offensive. After this, U.S. ground forces were withdrawn as part of a policy called Vietnamization. Despite the Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued until the collapse of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

On the anti-communist side, South Korea had the second-largest contingent of foreign troops in South Vietnam after the United States. The first South Korean troops began arriving in 1964 and large combat battalions began arriving a year later, with the South Koreans soon developing a reputation for effectiveness. Indeed, they conducted counterinsurgency operations so well that American commanders felt that Korean area of responsibility was the safest.

The Vietnam War has continued to become an argument point in major political campaigns. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney were all tarred as some sort of draft-dodger, and the GOP-funded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sank Purple Heart-awarded John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004 by accusing him of conduct unbecoming of a soldier.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Dien Bien Phu: 1954 battle changed Vietnam's history, CNN
  2. [1] In 1967, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commissioned RAND Corporation Analyst Dr. Daniel Ellsberg to write a study explaining to the State Department how they could win the war. By the time he completed it, he concluded that America was not "on the wrong side, we were the wrong side" and dropped a photocopy at the New York Times, in case they were interested. ;)
  3. An era of the original anti-apartheid movement in South Africa's Communist Party as well.
  4. Emile de Antonio's film, made in 1968, was made three years before the Pentagon Papers leak and actually proved to be correct.
  5. Plagiarist!
  6. With some back-roomed chicanery to make the blood run cold.
  7. The Vietnam War as History, University of Houston
  8. Counting Hell
  9. Roger Warner. Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos (Steerforth, 1998), pg. 366.
  10. Charles Hirschman et al., "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate." Population and Development Review, December 1995
  11. [2]
  12. The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam, The New York Times
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