After reading a lot of the posts and comments on the blog so far I felt compelled to write about the "real" reason we started the Vietnam war. While it is very true that our intention was to "liberate" South Vietnam, it wasn't so much for their benefit as it was to stop the spread of communism. The reason people supported the war to begin with was because the American people were told about the conditions the South Vietnamese lived in and we wanted to help them improve their lives. However, the simple fact is that, at this point in history, we were doing everything we could to stop communism from continuing its spread; a phenomenon known as the "domino theory". President Eisenhower was one of the first to use this analogy when he said, "Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences." Additionally, our foreign policy strategy became known as "containment" which simply meant that we had to do whatever we could to stop communism from following this domino pattern. President Truman first spoke about America's containment strategy in his famous "Truman Doctrine" in which he says, "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
A lot of people say that there were no battles and no deaths in the Cold War and while it's true that the Soviet Union and America never traded bullets directly, there were still millions of casualties all over the world because of the influences of these two nations. I remember a time in high school when a friend and I were doing a report on the Soviet-Afghan War for our Cold War class and our librarian said "The Soviet- Afghan War? I thought you guys were doing the Cold War!" My friend and I laughed to each other because we both knew that it WAS part of the Cold War (and because we are such history nerds). So next time you think the Cold War was all bark and no bite, do some research on the "proxy wars" that took place in countries like Angola, Afghanistan, Korea, East Germany, Lebanon, and yes, even Vietnam.
Below is a short video of Truman delivering the "Truman Doctrine". It's easy to see how this mind frame would lead us to invading Vietnam several decades later...
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4 comments:
First of all, I'd like to thank you for doing that research, and informing us of the "real" reason of the Vietnam War.
Second of all, it really does make sense, when you think about it. The "red scare" was an extremely tense moment in American history. Although the Vietnam War came a few decades after the initial onset of the tension, I think that was a huge catalyst for the United State's hasty response to the problem.
This post really does a good job of explaining the real reason why we went to war in Vietname. This shows that the Cold War did have an influence in why we did go to war. The Cold War indirectly caused millions of deaths and this post provides good insight to how the United States felt about the topic of communism.
O'Brein talks about the Cold War when he talks about being drafted into a war he didn't like or understand. "Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes?" (40). This shows that even the soldiers serving in the war didn't totally understand why they were fighting or who they were fighting for.
This was a great post, Brian, most appreciated!
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