Tracy High School HA 2. Was U.S. military intervention in Vietnam justified? Article I

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1 Tracy High School HA 2 Was U.S. military intervention in Vietnam justified? Article I U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War changed the American public's perspective on the cold war and on how much the United States should be willing to pay in money and blood to attain foreign-policy goals. It also diminished public trust in the government. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were part of the French Empire, grouped together under the name Indochina. The region was occupied by Japan during the Second World War. After Japan's defeat, Vietnamese nationalists (the Vietminh), who had fought against the Japanese occupiers, demanded independence from France. France objected, and a ten year war ensued. In 1950, France recognized a pro-french Vietnamese government, led by Bao Dai and located in Saigon in the south. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietminh, claimed that he was the legitimate representative of Vietnamese nationalists and countered by declaring the independence of the northern section of Vietnam, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) with Hanoi as its capital city. He continued the war against French colonial forces, inflicting the final defeat on the French army on 7 May 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, located in northwest Vietnam near the border with Laos, eighty miles from the Chinese border. The battle cost five thousand French casualties, and about twice that number were taken prisoner. France appealed to the United States for military help but was turned down. At peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland, it was decided that Vietnam would be divided along the seventeenth parallel for two years, after which a nationwide democratic election would determine who should rule the united Vietnam. The United States refused to accept the agreement (but agreed not to prevent its implementation). Bao Dai also refused to abide by the agreement, as did Ngo Dinh Diem, who succeeded Bao Dai as head of state in On 26 October 1956 Diem declared the independence of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The United States and its Western allies quickly recognized the South Vietnamese regime. In 1957 North Vietnam began a covert military campaign to destabilize the South Vietnamese regime. The Vietcong, manned by procommunist cadres in the South, was created, trained, and supplied by the North. By 1961 its strength was estimated at one hundred thousand. South Vietnam was already sinking into turmoil, as the Buddhist-majority population became increasingly disenchanted with the oppressive Diem regime, which relied largely on the nation's Catholic minority. By early 1963 the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, advised the State Department that the United States should begin to search for an alternative to Diem. On 1 November 1963 South Vietnamese military officers overthrew Diem, and he and his brother were shot to death. American support for the South Vietnamese regime began in 1955 and escalated as the Vietcong's attacks on the Saigon regime increased. Between January 1961 and June 1962, the number of U.S. military advisers in Saigon increased from 700 to 12,000. By the time of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, that number had reached 16,200. On 2 August 1964 North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the destroyer C. Turner Joy to join the Maddox, and on 4 August both destroyers reportedly came under attack. In response the administration sent Congress a resolution, which came to be called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to use American forces in Southeast Asia to defend American allies against communist attack. The House approved this resolution unanimously, and the Senate concurred with only two dissenting votes. President Johnson was thus given the authority to

2 increase the number of troops in Vietnam and use them in battle without asking Congress for a declaration of war. On 7 February 1965 the Vietcong attacked a U.S. base near Pleiku, killing seven Americans and wounding more than one hundred. In retaliation Johnson ordered Operation Flaming Dart, in which a North Vietnamese military base, located sixty miles north of the border separating North from South Vietnam, was bombed. On 10 February the Vietcong attacked a hotel at Qui Nhon, eighty miles east of Pleiku, killing twenty-three members of the 140th Maintenance Detachment of a U.S. Army aircraftrepair unit. On 13 February, Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, an increasingly massive bombing campaign against targets inside North Vietnam, which continued with only a few breaks until 1968, when Johnson, as part of his peace initiative, announced a bombing moratorium. In March 1965 two U.S. Marine battalions were sent to defend the Da Nang airfield. These Marines were the first American combat troops in Vietnam. In summer 1965 General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the American forces in Vietnam, asked for forty-four additional battalions and by December 1965 the number of U.S. troops in the country had reached 200,000. In 1966 that number reached 400,000, and by the end of 1967 more than 500,000. By the end of 1968 the number of American soldiers in Vietnam had peaked at 540,000. Under President Richard M. Nixon's "Vietnamization" plan, which shifted more of the burdens of the fighting to the South Vietnamese military, American forces were drawn down to 280,000 at the end of 1970 and 140,000 at the end of The Vietnamization plan was part of President Nixon's dual-track policy of "peace with honor." The aims of this strategy were to reduce and then end the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and reach an accommodation between North and South Vietnam. Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, met in secret with a North Vietnamese negotiator in August 1969, and in February 1970 he began talks with Le Duc Tho, the chief North Vietnamese peace representative. While the secret talks were going on in Paris and the reduction of U.S. forces continued, the United States also expanded the war to neighbors of Vietnam. In 1969 the United States began bombing Vietcong hideouts in Cambodia, and, in April 1970, Nixon ordered an invasion of Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. In October 1972 Kissinger announced that the talks with the North Vietnamese were progressing and that he believed "peace [was] at hand." Last minute snags in the talks led Nixon to order the Christmas bombing of 1972, and after eleven days of massive bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong, North Vietnam returned to the negotiations table. The peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam was signed on 17 January 1973, over the objections of South Vietnam. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam on 29 March In January 1975 the North Vietnamese resumed their offensive against the South. On 17 April, Saigon fell to the communists and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City; Vietnam was united. More than 56,000 Americans died in the war, and 300,000 were wounded; 1,300 soldiers were reported missing in action (MIA); 400,000 South Vietnamese and 900,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed. It is estimated that 750,000 Cambodian civilians and 150,000 Laotian civilians also died. The legacy of the Vietnam War may be measured by two concepts it bequeathed the political discourse in the United States. The first is credibility gap, coined to express the American public's increasing doubts regarding President Johnson's announcements about the progress of the war. Indeed, scholars point to the U.S. involvement (and the manner in which it was handled domestically) as one of the two major events that led to a secular diminution in the American in the American public's support for and belief in its government institutions and the spread of cynicism and apathy among the citizenry. (The other event was Watergate.) The second term born out of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the Vietnam syndrome--the profound reluctance of Americans to support U.S. involvement in foreign wars if the number of U.S. causalities entailed rises above an unrealistically low (and, hence, in most cases, operationally paralyzing) var. The

3 heavy emphasis in post-vietnam U.S. military tactics on high-tech weapons and precision-guided munitions is a result of the Vietnam War. Reliance on such weapons diminished the risk to American lives, but whether or not this reliance on high-tech gadgetry is always the most effective approach militarily is a different question. View Point I: Yes, U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was in keeping with the U.S. policy of containing communism. No other issue in post-second World War U.S. foreign policy has been more controversial and more emotionally charged than the U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War also contributed to the demise of two presidencies. President Lyndon B. Johnson came into office with an ambitious domestic agenda to change American society forever, righting past wrongs through his Great Society and civil-rights legislation. He was soon consumed by the deepening involvement of the United States in Vietnam, and, in 1968, defeated psychologically and by all accounts a broken man, he decided not to seek a second term. His successor, Richard M. Nixon, became convinced that the antiwar movement and perhaps even the Democratic Party were secretly funded by foreign sources the Soviet Union or Cuba. When Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), refused to allow their services to engage in domestic spying on Nixon's opponents, Nixon ordered the creation of the "Plumbers," a private covert army composed of Cuban émigrés and Americans of curious backgrounds who had worked for the CIA in the early 1960s in its anti-castro campaign. One of the first operations of the Plumbers was the June 1972 break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. Nixon resigned his office in August 1974 after the discovery of his illegal attempts to obstruct justice by attempting to prevent an investigation of the break-in. The passions the Vietnam War aroused--and the fact that the United States lost the war-have always made it difficult to assess the merits of the American decision to intervene in Vietnam. In addition, what we now know about the brittleness of the international communist movement and its internal divisions also makes it hard to see the events in Southeast Asia through the eyes of decision makers at the time. Yet, to make sense of the U.S. decisions regarding the war, one must take their point of view. Their thinking was not unreasonable for the time and was consistent with the assumptions sustaining U.S. foreign policy as a whole. This period itself may be divided in three: , when efforts were made to assist the South Vietnamese Army to fight more effectively; , when Johnson Americanized the war; and , when the Nixon administration inherited the war and continued it for another five years. Some of the justifications used by the Nixon administration were similar to those of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Other, new calculations intervened as well, however, having to do with Nixon and Kissinger's efforts to fashion new relationships with the Soviet Union a China and to create a global order in which the United States would be less of a world policeman. While the United States was trying to offer the two communist powers inducements to become more status quo oriented, it was also important to make sure that the USSR and China understood that the relatively lower profile the United States was going to assume in the new order did not mean that they could engage in continuing efforts to erode the West's position by using war-by-proxy tactics. There are other criticisms leveled against the American involvement. One addressed the question of whether or not the U.S. military employed the right strategy for fighting the war. Not only military analysts such as Harry Summers and Andrew Krepinevich raised the issue; it was also raised by the GIs themselves, some of whom chalked the letters UUUU their helmets ("The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful"). Indeed, the strategic policies a military tactics employed by the Johnson administration under the direction of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara did little to take the necessary steps to win the war or stabilize South Vietnam and make it fully self sufficient. McNamara's poorly conceived idea about how to fight the war, however, do not invalidate

4 intervention in principle. Other critics question the morality of the American involvement, pointing to what they see as the lack of proportionality between the level of violence the U.S. forces used and the importance of the goals being pursued and the likelihood of achieving them. Once again, however, this critical approach to tactical military policy neither addresses the strategic importance of defending South Vietnam nor means that there were no alternate policies that could have been successful. Vietnam was divided into two countries in In the context of the cold war, this situation was not unique. Moreover, when the pro-western half of a divided state such as Germany or Korea came under attack or threat of attack from the other, pro-soviet half, the United States did not hesitate to act quickly and decisively to defend the pro-western sector. Thus, in 1948, when the Truman administration concluded that the Soviet Union might be planning to take over West Berlin-which, although deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation, was an undisputed part of the combined Western occupation zones of Germany--the United States put its forces on alert and began a massive airlift of supplies, letting the Soviets know that the United States would react forcefully to any effort to interfere with the Western lifeline. Two years later, when North Korea invaded South Korea, the administration reacted quickly by sending American troops to defend the South. The decisions by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations to resist communist encroachment from North Vietnam into South Vietnam was thus entirely in keeping with U.S. policy of containment as it was practiced at the time. There were five other reasons that prompted the U.S. intervention. With the information available today, not all these reasons appear compelling. In fact, we now know that some of them were not all based on robust factual or logical foundations. Yet, decision makers at the time did not have the benefit of this knowledge. The first argument for intervention was based on the Munich analogy. The lessons drawn from the 1938 Munich Agreement among Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the United Kingdom, and France were a formative influence on the generation of American leaders who made the decision to intervene in Vietnam. In that agreement, the Western powers agreed to sever the Sudetenland region from Czechoslovakia and give it to Germany. Adolf Hitler had already sent German forces to occupy the Rhineland in 1936 and Austria in March Both actions were in strict contravention of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler's argument was that he was taking full control of his country (in the case of the Rhineland) and reunifying the German-speaking people (in the case of Austria). The Sudetenland was populated by people of German stock, and Hitler claimed it would be his last territorial demand. The British and the French agreed to his occupation of the region. In May 1939, however, Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in September it invaded Poland, triggering the outbreak of the Second World War. The lesson Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Robert S. McNamara, Walt W. Rostow, and all the other decision makers who developed the U.S. strategy in Vietnam drew from the Munich experience was straightforward: a greedy dictator cannot be appeased; the more he is given the stronger and more ambitious he becomes; and eventually, and inevitably, he will threaten vital American interests, at which point the United States will have to make a stand. It was thus better and far less costly, they believed, to tackle such a ruler and defeat him early, when he is weaker rather than stronger. The North Vietnamese encroachment followed communist victories in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, and China-and also communist attempts to take over Greece, break up Iran, and meddle in Turkey. Communist expansion had to be stopped; the line had to be drawn. The successful foiling of communist designs on Greece, Turkey, and Iran were recent examples for American policymakers that taking a firm stance did pay. The second argument for U.S. intervention in Vietnam was the recognition of the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China. Mao Tse-tung accused Nikita S. Khrushchev of be coming soft and effete, more concerned with improving the living standards of Soviet citizens than with spreading the socialist revolution. Vying for legitimacy in the communist world, China took a belligerent stance toward world

5 affairs, calling the United States a "paper tiger" and belittling the likely cost of a global nuclear war that might result from a direct confrontation between the communist and free worlds (a cost to which Khrushchev referred when explaining his adoption of a less-confrontational attitude toward the West following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). U.S. decision makers were convinced that China was encouraging and assisting North Vietnam to attack the South as part of a Chinese master plan to take over Asia. American policymakers perceived that China had tried such expansion before-in Korea. This radical, revolutionary China harbored dangerous ambitions. Although it was actually the pro-soviet factions in both Korea (led by Kim II-Sung) and North Vietnam (led by Ho Chi Minh) that had launched aggressive attacks on their respective neighbors to the south, American policymakers at the time remained convinced that what they perceived as a monolithic communist movement had to be stopped. Vietnam was a good place to draw the line. The third reason was the Soviet Union's support for what it called "wars of national liberation." In a secret speech delivered in late 1960 Khrushchev admitted that the Marxist notion of spreading socialism through revolutions in advanced industrial societies was no longer viable because these capitalist countries had become militarily strong. Any Soviet aid to efforts in destabilizing such societies might be exceedingly costly for Russia. The alternative was to encourage communist revolutions in Third World countries, a concept advanced by Vladimir I. Lenin in his writings on imperialism. In the 1950s and 1960s liberation movements in many of these countries were fighting the colonial powers for national independence. By siding with the nationalist forces during these revolutions, indigenous communists had a good opportunity to take over the reigns of power once independence was achieved. The Soviet Union could help its communist supporters come to power and weaken Western colonial nations such as Britain and France. The Kennedy administration became convinced that Vietnam was a test case for this new Soviet policy, one that had to be thwarted. The fourth reason had to do with an argument voiced by many: while free markets were suitable for advanced societies, command economies and planning were more suitable for Third World countries in the early stages of economic development. MIT economist Walt Rostow challenged such views in his 1960 book; The Five Stages of Economic Growth (somewhat immodestly subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto). Kennedy read the book before his presidential election campaign and later appointed Rostow deputy national security adviser. Rostow's beliefs were widely shared in the Kennedy administration, many of whose decision makers saw Vietnam as an "on-going lab" (in the words used by General Maxwell D. Taylor testifying before a Congressional committee) for U.S. economic and social development ideas. It was thus important to make a stand in Vietnam, not only to prevent a communist takeover, but also to show the efficacy of Western-style economic and social development plans. At least until 1965, policymakers placed much emphasis on various social and economic development schemes to accompany the military effort. The fifth reason had to do with domestic politics. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations had learned-perhaps too well the lessons of China. In 1949 Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson wrote a White Paper to explain the Truman administration's decision not to intervene in China to prevent the communists from coming to power. "The unfortunate but inescapable fact," he wrote, "is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it." This statement was true, but it did not prevent the question of "Who Lost China?" from poisoning American politics for two decades, giving rise to a rabid right-wing backlash and an undemocratic communist witch hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. American decision makers, especially Democrats, became exceedingly reluctant to "lose" another Asian country to communism because of what would be perceived as American inaction. Domestic pressures for intervening in Vietnam against communist aggression were intense, and prudent politicians felt they could not defy such pressures without risk.

6 America lost nearly 60,000 soldiers in Vietnam. The number of Vietnamese killed-soldiers and civilians, Southerners and Northerners-is probably ten or twenty times greater. The United States did not save South Vietnam from communism and probably could not have done so if it continued to follow the military policies of the Johnson administration. In order to save American lives, the United States used high-tech attrition tactics that inflicted terrible damage on the people and the landscape of Vietnam, both North and South. Although the communist takeover of the South and the unification of Vietnam under communist rule did not lead to the wholesale massacres that took place in neighboring Cambodia between 1975 and 1978 under the Khmer Rouge regime, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians were sent to brutal "reeducation" camps, and many died. Vietnam did not become a pawn of China; in fact, its leadership's strong leanings toward the USSR created a new problem for Beijing in the context of its estrangement from Moscow. Although many neighboring countries in Southeast Asia remained noncommunist, Cambodia and Laos came under communism. American resolve in Vietnam, though ultimately unsuccessful, may even have discouraged and demoralized otherwise large and powerful communist revolutionary movements in countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Despite this current knowledge, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam should be judged to have been a costly mistake, given the way in which it was run, especially by the Johnson administration and during the early part of the Nixon administration. For this reason, it was not a "noble cause," as Ronald Reagan described it during the 1980 presidential campaign. It was not, however, a venture verging on criminality, as some critics suggest. It was a mistake because the goals the United States set for itself, to the extent that they were achievable, could not have been achieved with the plan successive administrations adopted and within the limitations that public opinion was willing to tolerate and the restrictions that Congress imposed. Much damage and pain were caused in the futile effort to achieve them. -BENJAMIN FRANKEL, SECURITY STUDIES References Gelb, Leslie H. and Richard K. Betts. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institutions, Gravel, Mike Gravel, ed. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-making on Vietnam, 5 Volumes. Boston: Beacon, Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, Herring, George C. Herring. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, New York: McGraw-Hill, Kahin, George McTurnin. Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam. New York: Knopf, Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin, Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, Podhoretz, Norman. Why We Were in Vietnam. New York: Simon & Schuster, Sheehan, Neil Sheehan. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977.