Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is a very complicated and opinionated subject. The causes of the war can be confusing, and often times vary from source to source. In this paper I will examine the situation in Vietnam and try to explain the root causes of the war. I will also offer a comprehensive explanation of why the United States went into the war along with the situation it was in and other options it had.

In order to understand the Vietnam War you must first understand the background of and the situation in Vietnam. Vietnam had been a French colony for many years, and by the end of World War II, most of the Vietnamese wanted their freedom. Vietnamese tradition mainly revolved around rice farming and the village. The Vietnamese village was largely self sustaining. Most Vietnamese were subsistence farmers, and the village elder made many of the decisions. There were no taxes, and when the new Vietnamese government under Diem tried to impose their rules, such as taxes, on the villages, the villagers did not want to cooperate.

During World War II the Japanese started to take interest in the Vietnam area. The Japanese army invaded and took control of most of the country, to France's dismay. Towards the end of the war the French wanted Vietnam back. When the Japanese finally surrendered to the United States, the army withdrew from Vietnam. Although the Japanese had left, the French had another problem; the Vietnamese wanted their independence. An uprising began, backed by the Chinese, and the United States financially backed the French war to put the uprising down. The U.S. provided about 80% of funds for the war because if the Vietnamese were victorious, they feared that the Chinese would introduce communism there. The war became difficult and costly, however, and France eventually gave Vietnam its independence in 1954.

All this time a man named Ho Chi Minh, a strict follower of Lenin and Marx, began to stir up trouble. He met with Stalin, the head of Russia, and Mao Tse-tung, the leader of communist China to secure help for the development of his emerging communist party. Ho started to organize his communist party and called it the Viet-Minh. The Viet-Minh had little influence because they started out as a very small group, and they had no military. Eventually, with the help of the Soviet Union and China, they would come back in full force as the militant Viet-Cong and take over South Vietnam.

After being granted independence, a man named Ngo Dinh Diem was elected premier of Vietnam. Diem's government had the full backing of the United States, but they were left alone to rebuild their war-torn country. There was virtually no economy, and there were hostilities between North and South Vietnam. Diem had to resettle about 900,000 refugees who fled from the North, while between 60,000 to 100,000 Viet-Minh supporters left from the South to go to the North. The major problem that Diem's government faced was changing the entire traditional village society of Vietnam. In Vietnam the people had been used to the small village-centered life for a very long time. There was no organizational structure such as cities and states in the U.S. Vietnam was also not a technologically advanced nation, so it could not go about its governing business quickly and efficiently. Without proper the organizational structure and support, South Vietnam would not become stable. A second dilemma was that both the North and the South each spread tons of propaganda through the media against the other. Some mail was even intercepted by the communists to keep the Southern ideals out, all the while promoting their own Communist ones. Eventually Diem was granted emergency powers to suppress the violent Northerners and unite the country. Diem became very strict and ruthless, and eventually he was kidnapped and murdered by some men under his own command in a U.S. supported coup. The whole time Diem was in office Viet-Cong (the former Viet-Minh) had been sneaking into the South and performing many acts of terrorism and violence. After Diem's death, the Viet-Cong started a full scale attack for control of all Vietnam. The Communists could have stayed in North Vietnam, but they had none of the agriculture of the South which they desperately needed, plus they had too much pride to only have control of half of the country.

The Chinese backed Viet-Cong rebellion posed two threats. The first one was to South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese had to defend themselves with a very small and unorganized military. The second was on the United States, because the U.S. hated the idea of the spread of communism, especially during the height of the Cold War. The Viet-Cong started to attack U.S. military units in the area, and the U.S. responded by bombing the North Vietnamese. The next very fragile decision for the United States would be whether or not to go to war.

Before the official start of the war in 1964, the U.S. had already committed itself in Vietnam. It had provided significant financial backing for the French war there. The U.S. had also sent many military advisors and trainers to help the South Vietnamese against the North. The Viet-Cong had also attacked U.S. forces in the area and we had already begun to bomb them. The question was not whether the United States was going to war, but what kind of war it would be. On August 7, 1964, the Southeast Asia Resolution was passed by Congress. Only two members of the entire Congress did not support the resolution. The resolution called for a conditional declaration of war on North Vietnam. President Johnson had a few options: to send a pacification force into South Vietnam to keep the North out of Southern villages, to heavily bomb the North and use limited ground forces only in South Vietnam, or wage a full-scale war that would include invading North Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos to destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail. The Ho Chi Minh trail was the Communist supply line to the South through Laos and Cambodia. Eventually the second option was decided upon. There were several reasons for this choice, and it was chiefly up to President Johnson to decide. If the United States only sent in a pacification force, the hope was that it would deter the North from entering the South, or they would launch an all out conventional invasion against the South which would give the U.S. a great advantage because then they would be easy targets for the Air Force. However, that was a very optimistic outcome, and the plan probably would have ended in failure. Johnson really only had two realistic choices regarding Vietnam; to do nothing, or wage an all out war to decisively crush the North Vietnamese with the possibility of a conflict with China and the Soviet Union, although not going to war would have carried as much or more dissent and embarrassment than the war itself actually did. The main reason for not choosing the third