The Vietnam War (575 words)

The Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was the most controversial
war in American history. Costing more than 47,000 U.S. lives and
$140,000,000, the war had momentous impact on the country, politically,
economically, and socially. More significantly, the United States
failed to achieve its stated war aims, for the first time in history.

The goal was to preserve an independent, noncommunist government in South
Vietnam, but by the war’s end in 1975, all of Vietnam was under the communist
rule of Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The U.S. emerged
from the war disgraced: a global superpower had been bested by the nearly
third-world nation of North Vietnam. But how? Antiwar sentiment among
the civilian population contributed to the American defeat, but the most
fundamental fault lay in the flawed reasoning behind U.S. involvement.

As the human and material costs of the
war increased, the American public questioned the objectives of the war.

The nation became divided into two opposed groups: the “hawks,” who believed
that the war must be won to prevent the spread of communism, and the “doves,”
who believed that America should withdraw from the war to prevent further
loss. Scholars discredited the president’s justifications for escalation.

The war, they charged, was a civil war between the North and South Vietnamese,
and not an effort by Soviet and Chinese communists to expand. Antiwar
protests erupted across the nation, concentrated in college campuses.

In the April of 1967, more than 300,000 people attended a demonstration
in New York City. Later that year more radical demonstrations arose
as antiwar radicals besieged a draft center in Oakland, California.

Such strong opposition amongst the public
was echoed by objection to the war in the political world. Public protesting
forced congressmen to reexamine the justice of the war, and politicians
such as Senator William Fulbright were sharply critical of America’s policy.

By 1967, even Defense Secretary Robert McNamara opposed President Johnson’s
course of escalation. Although doves were a prominent minority, the
adversary force they created was enough to undermine the will of the government
to continue fighting. Without the full support of its people and
with a deeply divided government, the United States was hindered in its
efforts to effectively fight the Vietnam War.

The greatest problem with the war in Vietnam
was its flawed purpose. Washington had sought to control international
communism, but this global strategic concern masked the reality that the
appeal of communism in Vietnam derived from local economic, social, and
historical conditions. In essence, the U.S. response to Vietnam’s
communist threat was to apply a military solution to an internal political
problem. America’s infliction of destruction on Vietnam served only
to politically discredit the independent South Vietnamese government that
the United States sought to support.

The rhetoric of U.S. leaders following
World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement,
and the hazards of communism recognized no limit to the United States’
ability to meet the test of global leadership. In actuality, neither
the United States or any other nation had the power to guarantee alone
the freedom and security of the world’s peoples. Furthermore, the United
States underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese
communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause’s
survival. For the United States, it was a limited war.

Thusly, the failure of the United States
in the Vietnam War was a result of two major factors: strong antiwar sentiment,
and inaccurate rationalism. The Vietnam War brought an end to the
domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. policy since World War II, and
reshaped the nation forever.