American history question/discussion

[the_only_turek_fan]

History buffs help me out!

I have not completed my readings on the topic, so please do not jump all over me if I have some facts incorrect, but as I was reading something really stood out to me that kind of bothered me.

First of all, most of us are familiar with the reasons/"reasons" that Bush went to Iraq. I want to compare this war with the Vietnam war that lasted from 1959 - 1975.

From wikipedia:

John F. Kennedy's Escalation of the War, 1960–1963

Main article: Strategic Hamlet Program
When John F. Kennedy won the 1960 U.S. presidential election, one major issue Kennedy raised was whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the U.S. As Kennedy took over, despite warnings from Eisenhower about Laos and Vietnam, Europe and Latin America "loomed larger than Asia on his sights."[44] In his inaugural address, Kennedy made the ambitious pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."[45]
In June 1961, John F. Kennedy bitterly disagreed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev when they met in Vienna over key U.S.-Soviet issues. Cold war strategists concluded Southeast Asia would be one of the testing grounds where Soviet forces would test the USA's containment policy—begun during the Truman Administration and solidified by the stalemate resulting from the Korean War.[citation needed]
Although Kennedy stressed long-range missile parity with the Soviets, he was also interested in using special forces for counterinsurgency warfare in Third World countries threatened by communist insurgencies. Although they were originally intended for use behind front lines after a conventional invasion of Europe, Kennedy believed that the guerrilla tactics employed by special forces such as the Green Berets would be effective in a "brush fire" war in Vietnam. He saw British success in using such forces in Malaya as a strategic template.[citation needed]
The Kennedy administration remained essentially committed to the Cold War foreign policy inherited from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In 1961, Kennedy faced a three-part crisis—the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and a negotiated settlement between the pro-Western government of Laos and the Pathet Lao communist movement[46] These made Kennedy believe that another failure on the part of the United States to gain control and stop communist expansion would fatally damage U.S. credibility with its allies and his own reputation. Kennedy determined to "draw a line in the sand" and prevent a communist victory in Vietnam, saying, "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place," to James Reston of the New York Times immediately after meeting Khrushchev in Vienna.[47][48] Kennedy increased the number of U.S. military in Vietnam from 800 to 16,300.[citation needed]

Now the key part of that piece for me is what I made bold.....I am still a bit raw on the whole war and the history of it, but one obvious question that came to my mind was the fact that there was no real pretense for the Americans to go into Vietnam other than to flex their muscles and continue their quest to be an imperialistic empire. Of course there were many American casualties and casualties on the other side as a result of this war.

So the question begs, how was the invasion really different than what the US is trying to do now. And my real question is how does Bush get raked over the coals, when Kennedy gets a free pass for his actions?

Was there a deeper reason for this war? What am I missing? Am I even reading into this thing right?

Just from the few readings I have completed, it seems that using the military for the purposes of imperialism and economic colonization is not just a Republican thing, its an American thing.

[underGRADFlame]

Originally Posted by the_only_turek_fan

So the question begs, how was the invasion really different than what the US is trying to do now. And my real question is how does Bush get raked over the coals, when Kennedy gets a free pass for his actions?

I would think the main reason, is Kennedy had his head blown off if front of the country which kind of endeared him to the public.

[Azure]

If JFK wouldn't have been killed, I don't think he would have gotten a free pass.

Neither Iraq, nor Vietnam were justified IMO.

JFK started the screwup, Johnson continued it...and both administrations fought the war based on numbers. Nixon came in and just wanted to win at all costs. Moral loss or not.

[Hack&Lube]

Cold War proxy wars are very different from today's wars.

The bipolar world was very much under the Truman Doctrine and Domino theory of preventing the expansion of the Soviet Union. Much of the political thought of the day was that once countries fell to communism, so would their neighbours and give the Soviet Union even more power and influence and staging grounds for attack on the United States.

As the US could not directly fight the USSR and vice-versa, proxy wars were basically what took place where each assisted but did not directly attack each other in fear of mutually assured destruction. If you want a pretense to enter war, it was to support the democratic south Vietnam from military communist expansion and to prevent the supposed domino effect from occuring.

Yes, I would very much call the Cold War also a war of Imperialism but definetely not in the classical sense. It was a imperialistic war for influence, for ideology, and for the sheer survival of the world given the nuclear arsenals at push-button ready on both sides. I would not call modern day American wars to be classical imperialism either. The arguments that it's war for oil or military contracts at the start of the Iraq war have some credence but I don't think that argument floats anymore given the situation in the middle east and the possibility of the U.S. pulling out. Mostly, they were arrogant and full of hubris. They were trying to stave off what the Bush administration felt to be a source of imminent danger at the source, using what they thought was overwhelmingly superior military power...And they botched it terribly. Just like Vietnam.

They thought it'd be easy, they thought they could flex their muscles and get a quick victory. In one fell stroke they'd get rid of an antagonist of America (Saddam), stave off Terrorism at the source, and gain economic bounty from oil and contracts for rebuilding Iraq. Of course it all blew up in their faces. Absolutely ridiculous when many of the people there (Rumsfeld, Cheney) were involved in Vietnam as well...They were totally blind to the history they lived and thought they wouldn't relive their past mistakes. It was basically the arrogance and greed of far too few people given far too much power (in the aftermath of political suasion post 9/11) in one place.

Vietnam was so much more complicated, don't take what you read on Wikipedia for anything more than 1% of the surface truth. I would totally disagree with your general conclusion that "using the military for the purposes of imperialism and economic colonization is not just a Republican thing, its an American thing". Remember that the Korean war was fought by Harry Truman, a democrat. But then again, the political ideologies of the parties were pretty much in reverse in that era...(ie: Democrats were the southern white powerbase). Basically in fact, it's pretty much just a human thing. American just happens to have the military industrial machine, the odd confluence of power in one concentrated place, along with a substantial backing of their populace to try it every now and then while most other countries do not.

Also remember that the America of the early 1960s had a very different role and reputation on the world stage. America was the shining beacon of the west, the vanguard of the defense of all democratic, liberal, western countries against the forces of communism. It was the power that had just spent trillions rebuilding Europe and Kennedy was celebrated wherever he went in Europe. Perhaps in that era, they did rightfully have the mantle of "Team America: World Police" and people were glad that America was there rather than not. The credibility Kennedy spoke of was the credibility of the U.S. insofar as the confidence those western countries bordering the iron curtain had that America would defend their interests...so that they didn't themselves fall to the wave of communism predicted by domino theory before the era of detente. In that era, with so many countries bordering on revolution, civil war, and hundreds of ex-colonies shaking themselves free of their former European masters, it was very plausible that these states could easily violentely fall to communism.

[CaramonLS]

Originally Posted by the_only_turek_fan

So the question begs, how was the invasion really different than what the US is trying to do now. And my real question is how does Bush get raked over the coals, when Kennedy gets a free pass for his actions?

Depends who you talk to.

I know one of my history profs thought that Kennedy did not want to go to war and would always try to put the minimum # of troops in the region when his generals kept asking for more.

Vietnam was a weird situation in general because there really wasn't a specific incident in the beginning, but just a gradual escalation of forces and then turned into a war.

Huge back story with France and all their involvement. The US was really only there in the first place to bail them out. It was just a complete mess.

[MarchHare]

Vietnam was a weird situation in general because there really wasn't a specific incident in the beginning, but just a gradual escalation of forces and then turned into a war.

Gradual escalation until 1964, when this happened:

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident prompted the first large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. It was a pair of attacks perpetrated by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the Communist government of North Vietnam) against two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. The incident occurred on August 2 and 4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin.[1]

The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War, which lasted until 1975.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident

[Azure]

Originally Posted by CaramonLS

Depends who you talk to.

I know one of my history profs thought that Kennedy did not want to go to war and would always try to put the minimum # of troops in the region when his generals kept asking for more.

Didn't Kennedy have over 55,000 advisers there, helping the South?

Or was that Johnson?

[Azure]

I think the problem with both situations was that the pencil pushers in Washington were making the important decisions.

Look at how successful the US invasion of Iraq was, until they began rebuilding? Reason? The people on the ground in Iraq were calling the shots. Once they began rebuilding, idiots like Robert Gates became involved and screwed everything up.

[Magnum PEI]

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a sham, like the sinking of the USS Maine, the Zimmerman Telegraph, and the "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbour.

In 2005, it was revealed in an official NSA declassified report[2] that the USS Maddox first fired warning shots on the August 2 incident and that there may not have been North Vietnamese boats at the August 4 incident. The report said

t is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident

The Maddox was actually spying for the CIA in North Vietnamese waters, so any attack would not have been unprovoked.

[Azure]

Link?

[jammies]

As Hack'n'Lube pointed out quite eloquently, Vietnam was fought in a far different context - as it turned out, it was a mistake from the beginning but at the time there was a certain logic to it in the sense that the US wanted to contain Communist expansion at all costs. Remember this was a world in which African and Asian countries were shaking free of the West, often via revolutionary movements that were only too happy to accept Soviet assistance in doing so, and it looked like the power of Communism was waxing.

In the end, they probably did their cause far more harm than if they'd just let the Vietnamese fight it out themselves, but that was masterful politics by the North Vietnamese and Soviets, who essentially made the war unwinnable by dangling the prospect of escalation if the US had invaded North Vietnam and taken Hanoi - you simply can't defeat an enemy whose base is secure, the best you can do is stalemate. Since the Americans were afraid of what the Soviets and/or Chinese might do if they attacked North Vietnam, they never did so, and despite inflicting horrendous casualties on the order of 10 or 20 to 1 on their enemies, they eventually lost the war because the NVA didn't care how many men it lost and the USA definitely did.

In Iraq, the Bush administration made a different error - they had no qualms about going to Baghdad, but the problem was that Iraq was not the headquarters of the people they were trying to defeat. Sure, Saddam was a thug and a tyrant, but as far as supporting terrorism goes, he was a bit player, if even that. They would have done FAR better to reign in the Israelis, demonstrating control, and then attempted negotiation with the various states in the region to create an anti-terrorist coalition with the implied threat of targeted US action on states that didn't buy in. But that would take diplomatic skill and finesse, which the USA is not liberally supplied with, and not military force, which is a specialty.

[normtwofinger]

Basically came down to Vietnam starting to trade with China. China was being helped by USSR. So the US felt the USSR was spreading communism by using Ho Chi Minh to gain power in the north. The US funded the French to continue their fight in the Indochina war. Once the French were defeated, the country was split in 2, and the US felt it could not allow 'communism' to spread. They saw it was necessary to stop Ho Chi Minh and his communist rebels. The US backed Diem, the leader of the south, who was a tyrant himself, killing anyone who opposed him. He was so 'off the wall', the US orchestrated his assassination. Ho Chi Minh moved south with terrorist attacks on innocents, and the US used this as a motive to start an all out war.

So basically the US got involved because they are afraid of communism, and really had no right to be there. The was no initial attack on America.

I was just in Vietnam, and they view Ho Chi Minh as a hero, both in the north and the south. There is no real outward opposition to Americans. The war museums that I visited both showed the suffering from their side and the American losses as well. I thought that was handled pretty well. They have had war for many years, with China, French and the US. They are just happy to be in a peaceful state now and are still trying to rebuild for a better future.