History Vietnam War Paper Research Notes

it was only the rise of nationalism, and the corresponding growth of acceptance of individual liberty and responsibility, that provided a sort of legitimacy to violence directed against the state.

The essential features of guerrilla warfare are avoiding the enemy's strength-his main fighting forces-while striking at outposts and logistical support from unexpected directions. This principle is now often described as \"asymmetric,\" but it is as old as the word guerrilla itself.

However, elements of democracy-promoting idealism, linked to the legacy of President Woodrow Wilson, also found their way into the later (primarily Republican) neo-conservative agenda, albeit in the context of a pronounced tendency to American unilateralism. This was coupled with a belief, shared by realists, that 'power is often necessary to achieve moral purposes'.5 In the post-Vietnam period it was the Republican presidents who initiated two of the largest deployments of troops in 1990-1 and in 2003.

It was the reference point for failure and defeat that had to be surmounted. The United States learned quickly from the wars in Vietnam. They rebuilt their military across the 1980s to a point where their conventional military power was pre-eminent. They learned the instrumental lessons that eased the use of that power within a culture that was now more reticent on matters of such engagement.

There were readjustments in the balance of power between the Congress and the Presidency. But over time the 'moralism' too returned to strategic thinking, in the presidency of Jimmy Carter who was reluctant to assert power in such conflicts.

President, George W. Bush, supped, combining the proclivity of ills described by Nisbet above, to fashion a rhetorical strategy that mingled the 'tough' and the 'tender' in the 'balance of power that favors freedom'

Neoconservative loathing of certain realist aspects of US policy associated with Kissinger and the era of détente. The expediency adopted after Vietnam could not be allowed to replace a policy based on principle

Private corporations that gained lucrative contracts in both Vietnam and Iraq. Vast proportions of the construction needs were given over to private corporations in a less than competitive environment often with significant rewards.

The loss in Vietnam remained a potent reference point for certain US strategists who sought to overcome the memories and constraints of the lessons produced after that war. While the instrumental lessons were sharpened across the decades through various tactics of intervention, US credibility remained problematical as the reluctance to commit ground troops was palpably obvious.

Western European dimension to the 'Vietnam syndrome': the unwillingness of allies unconditionally and permanently to endorse a discretionary presidential power of military action.

McCrisken offers important and subtle insights into the implications of seeing Iraq as 'Bush's Vietnam'. Despite the limitations of 'analogy thinking', McCrisken concludes that the famous 'lessons' of Vietnam - above all the fact that American international power is not limitless - still apply.

In Vietnam, official thinking maintained that no-one would freely choose communism; in Iraq, the public US line is similarly (argues Masur) that no-one freely chooses 'unfreedom'.

A common way of understanding the history of US international policy is to see it as being shaped by cycles. The US foreign policy tradition embraces various facets: Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian (in Walter Russell Mead's famous formulation);10 isolationist and internationalist; unilateralist ('anti-entanglement') and mutilateralist; economic, geopolitical and democracy-promoting exceptionalist.

The Vietnam War unquestionably did see a (short-lived) reassertion of legislative authority, the emergence of a new public prudence about the use of military power, and a new caution at the top, embodied in figures as various as Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell. The term 'isolationism' is extremely unfashionable in academic circles, and has become little more than a term of abuse. However, the Vietnam War did, for good or ill, usher in a kind of leftist isolationism, as well as a more generalised sense of caution. It affected profoundly the administration of President Jimmy Carter.

October 2005 found 42 per cent of Americans in agreement with the proposition that the US 'should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can.

With policy reaction to Vietnam, it is certain that there will be a policy reaction to Iraq. The 2003 invasion illustrated, at the very least, the perils of inadequate planning and over-confidence, as well as the problematic nature of committing troops to a major combat in which core national interests are not clearly demonstrated.

Undue focus on military action clouds the key political realities, which can result in a military dominated campaign that misses the real focus of an insurgency. The destruction of the enemy army on the field contradicts the fact that the true power lies in the people and their government. An inability to match the insurgent's concept with an appropriate government one will not succeed. (Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam)

Revolutionary war is long and drawn out, consisting of three phases, one of organization, consolidation and preservation; one of progressive expansion; and finally the decisive phase, one in which culminates the destruction of the enemy. (Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, Mao Tse -Tung's Guerrilla Warfare)

The U.S. foreign policy that aspired to promote democracy abroad is often associated with the more liberal, tender hearted Democratic Party. However Republican Presidents like Woodrow Wilson espoused an idealistic agenda that 'power' is morally necessary. After Vietnam it was the Republican presidents, (Bush Sr and Jr) who initiated the largest deployments of troops in 1990-91 and 2003. (Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam)

The best chance for the army to succeed in Vietnam came about as the result of a high level study in mid-1965 in which the Army's flawed counter-insurgency program, consisting of search and destroy operations was rejected. A pacification program aimed at working closely with the population to win them over to the government's cause was seen as the way to succeed. The rural peasant must willingly support their goals and the critical action must take place at the village, province and district levels to succeed. (Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam)

The American public was wary of intervening abroad in the cause of democracy and freedom, and the bipartisan consensus that had supported American foreign policy since the 1940s dissolved. Democrats, in particular, questioned the need to contain communism everywhere around the globe and to act as the police of the world. The Democratic majority led Congress would enact the 1973 War Powers Resolution, limiting the president's power to send troops into combat for no more than ninety days without congressional consent. Asserting more control over matters of foreign policy, Congress increasingly emphasized the limits of American power, and the price Americans would pay in pursuit of specific foreign policy objectives. (The Postwar Impact of Vietnam, Howard Sitikoff)

Most American wars have obvious starting points or causes, but there was no fixed beginning for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The United States entered that war gradually when in May 1950; President Harry S. Truman authorized modest economic and military aid to the French, who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, made up of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and Communist-led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French were forced to agree to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist body south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower commenced instead to build a nation, South Vietnam, by forming a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against the North. (The Causes of the Vietnam War, Andrew J. Rotter)

\"When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them.\" The importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population were all critical in counterinsurgency operations. It is paradoxical as often the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; while sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. (The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual)

Americans seem unable to agree on what the lessons of Vietnam are, at least in regard to the question of where and under what circumstances the United States should use military force abroad. While many see in the myth of American supremacy a dangerous illusion that might again lead us into a protracted and futile war abroad, others want to reconstruct the myth, of America in the role of world leader it played before its failure in Vietnam. Post-Vietnam, America's Pentagon was no longer willing to be blindly led by political objectives, it began to demand to know where it could fight with the support of the public; in other words, our military submitted its strategy to a sort of \"Vietnam litmus test.\" And the obvious consequence is that the United States became a more cautious imperial power. The difficulty in examining the events following that period is trying to separate the specific military consequences from other important changes that have tended to complicate America's role in the world, but would probably have occurred even if the war had never happened. These include the enormous change in Third World attitudes toward the United States in which many Third World governments have reacted strongly against what they consider an overwhelming American presence, against the growing influence of American capital and the American culture and mores that come with it. During the same period, America's European allies became stronger and more independent, and less willing to follow America's lead unquestioningly in matters of foreign policy. (Harper's Magazine, What Are the Consequences of Vietnam? Mark Danner, James Chace, Paul Kennedy, Francis Fitzgerald)

Popularized first in the late 1970s to refer to poor military and foreign policy decisions by the U.S. in the conduct of the War, the \"Vietnam Effect\" or the \"Vietnam Syndrome\", referred to the defeatist mentality caused by our first loss in a major military conflict. Conservatives argued that Vietnam was a war we \"won\" on the \"battlefield\", but \"lost\" in the mass media, domestic politics, and the Paris Peace Talks. Other interpretations suggested that we were never close to \"winning\" our extension of the French colonial war against the Vietnamese, failing to understand the determination of the North Vietnamese Army and the insurrection by the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. Even in strictly military terms, we had merely reacted to enemy actions, rarely taking initiative and never really \"winning hearts and minds\" of the Vietnamese civilians caught between warring adversaries. Traditional military tactics of territorial control failed and were replaced with equally unsuccessful \"body counts\" of enemy dead, which when broadcast on the evening news only fueled anti-war sentiments. From a conservative perspective, the \"Vietnam Syndrome\" was our defeatism in the aftermath of losing the War; in the liberal view, the \"Vietnam Effect\" was a consequence of our Cold War-era neo-imperialism. (The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies, john Carlos Rowe, The \"Vietnam Effect\" in the Persian Gulf Wars)

On January 17, 1968, President Johnson, in his State of the Union address, emphasized that the pacification program- the extension of the control of Saigon into the countryside-was progressing satisfactorily. Sixty-seven percent of the population of South Viet Nam lived in relatively secure areas; the figure was expected to rise. A week later, the Tet offensive overthrew the assumptions of American strategy. The basic problem has been conceptual: the tendency to apply traditional maxims of both strategy and \"nation-building\" to a situation which they did not fit. American military strategy followed the classic doctrine that victory depended on a combination of control of territory and attrition of the opponent. The theory was that defeat of the main forces would cause the guerrillas to wither on the vine. Victory would depend on inflicting casualties substantially greater than those we suffered until Hanoi's losses became \"unacceptable.\" This strategy suffered from two disabilities: (a) the nature of guerrilla warfare; (b) the asymmetry in the definition of what constituted unacceptable losses. A guerrilla war differs from traditional military operation because its key prize is not control of territory but control of the population.

He makes plain the absolute need for a US President to gain the support of the American people before leading the nation into a war and the requirement that such a war also be made the focal point for both the Executive and Legislative Branches.

Its central thesis is that a lack of appreciation of military theory and military strategy—especially the relationship between military strategy and national policy—led to a faulty definition of the nature of the war. The result was the exhaustion of the Army against a secondary guerrilla force and the ultimate failure of military stategy to support the national policy of containment of communist expansion.

But instead of providing professional military advice on how to fight the war the military more and more joined with the systems analysts in determining the material means we were to use. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among many Army officers was that \"the Army doesn't make strategy,\" and \"there is no such thing as Army strategy.\" There was a general feeling that strategy was budget-driven and was primarily a function of resource allocation. The task of the Army, in their view, was to design and procure material, arms and equipment and to organize, train, and equip soldiers for the Defense Establishment. These attitudes derive in part from a shallow interpretation.

While it is true that the National Security Act transferred operational command to the Department of Defense, leaving the Army with the task to \"organize, train, and equip active duty and reserve forces,\" the Army General Staff is still charged with \"determination of roles and missions of the Army and strategy formulation, plans and application; Joint Service matters, plans, and operations...\"

Further, to argue as some do that in our democracy only the President can \"make\" strategy is to confuse the issue, since in most cases the President does not formulate military strategy but rather decides on the military strategy recommended to him by his national security advisors, both military and civilian. Unconsciously, such attitudes reflected a regression in military thought. As early as 1971 then Lieutenant Colonel Albert Sidney Britt III, Department of History, United States Military Academy, noted that \"the modern philosophy of limited war derives in part from the practice of the 18th century. \"4 Colonel Britt's observations were borne out in the classic critique of 18th century warfare, Carl von Clausewitz's On War.

Vietnam was a reaffirmation of the peculiar relationship between the American Army and the American people. The American Army really is a people's Army in the sense that it belongs to the American people who take a jealous and proprietary interest in its involvement. When the Army is committed the American people are committed, when the American people lose their commitment it is futile to try to keep the Army committed. In the final analysis, the American Army is not so much an arm of the Executive Branch as it is an arm of the American people. The Army, therefore, cannot be committed lightly. General Fred C. Weyand Chief of Staff, US Army, July 1976.

One of the more simplistic explanations for our failure in Vietnam is that it was all the fault of the American people—that it was caused by a collapse of national will. Happily for the health of the Republic, this evasion is rare among Army officers. A stab-in-the-back syndrome never developed after Vietnam.

The main reason it is not right to blame the American public is that President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a conscious decision not to mobilize the American people—to invoke the national will—for the Vietnam war -Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Phil G. Goulding

Having deliberately never been built, it could hardly be said that the national will \"collapsed.\" According to his biographer, President Johnson's decision not to mobilize the American people was based on his fears that it would jeopardize his \"Great Society\" programs. As he himself said,: ...History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: The Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society.... And the Generals. Oh, they'd love the war, too. It's hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That's why I am suspicious of the military. They're always so narrow in their appraisal of everything.

They needed to tell him that it would be an obvious fallacy to commit the Army without first commiting the American people. Such a commitment would require battlefield competence and clear-cut objectives to be sustained, but without the commitment of the American people the commitment of the Army to prolonged combat was impossible.

Unfortunately, this fallacy was not obvious to either the military or its Commander-in-Chief, for the limited war theorists had excluded the American people from the strategic equation.

It is often forgotten that the attempt to fight without mobilizing the American people and without a declaration of war by the Congress almost came to grief in Korea. As General Maxwell D. Taylor wrote: The national behavior showed a tendency to premature war-weariness and precipitate disenchantment with a policy which had led to a stalemated war. This experience, if remembered, could have given some warning of dangers ahead to the makers of the subsequent Vietnam policy. Unfortunately, there was no thorough-going analysis ever made of the lessons to be learned from Korea, and later policy makers proceeded to repeat many of the same mistakes.

With all the warnings that the Korean war provided about the importance of mobilizing the national will and legitimizing this mobilization through a declaration of war, how could we go so wrong in Vietnam? Part of the answer is in the temper of the times. The Vietnam war coincided with a social upheaval in America where the old rules and regulations were dismissed as irrelevant and history no longer had anything to offer.

The greatest contribution Vietnam is making—right or wrong is beside the point—is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.33 But \"right or wrong\" was not beside the point and neither was the intangible of \"public ire.\" Vietnam reinforced the lessons of Korea that there was more to war, even limited war, than those things that could be measured, quantified and computerized. A bitter little story made the rounds during the closing days of the Vietnam war: When the Nixon Administration took over in 1969 all the data on North Vietnam and on the United States was fed into a Pentagon computer—population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, number of tanks, ships, and aircraft, size of the armed forces, and the like. The computer was then asked, 'When will we win?' It took only a moment to give the answer: 'You won in 1964!'

By the spring of 1965 it was obvious that such a limited response was not effective, and the decision was made to commit US ground combat troops to the war. Rather than go back to the Congress and ask for a declaration of war \"efforts were made to make the change as imperceptible as possible to the American public... \"44 In retrospect this was a key strategic error. Failure to make this crucial political decision led to fear of making the political decision to mobilize the reserves. Failure to mobilize the reserves led to failure of the military leadership to push for strategic concepts aimed at halting North Vietnamese aggression and led to campaigns against the symptoms of the aggression—the insurgency in the South—rather than against the aggressor itself.

One reason was that it would have seemed ludicrous for a great power like the United States to declare war on a tiny country like North Vietnam. War sanctions, both foreign and domestic, were deemed too massive to be appropriate. Another reason was the desire not to risk a Korea-style intervention by threatening Chinese security. There was also the danger that a formal declaration of war against North Vietnam might have triggered the implementation of security guarantees by China and the Soviet Union. Yet another reason may have been the fear that Congress would not approve such a declaration. This refusal would have caused an immediate halt to US efforts in South Vietnam (a preferable result, given the final outcome).

The Vietnam War unquestionably did see a (short-lived) reassertion of legislative authority, the emergence of a new public prudence about the use of military power, and a new caution at the top, embodied in figures as various as Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell. The term 'isolationism' is extremely unfashionable in academic circles, and has become little more than a term of abuse. However, the Vietnam War did, for good or ill, usher in a kind of leftist isolationism, as well as a more generalised sense of caution. It affected profoundly the administration of President Jimmy Carter, as well as that of Ronald Reagan.

After the war, William Ehrhart asked a Vietnamese general what he thought of the Americans as warriors. After politely praising their bravery, the general named what he saw as their military shortcomings: fixed positions, dependency on air support, and ignorance of the country. 'Would it have mattered if we had done things differently?' Ehrhart asked. No, the general replied, 'Probably not. History was not on your side. We were fighting for our homeland. What were you fighting for?' Ehrhart answered, 'Nothing that really mattered'.

The Vietnam War traumatized much of America, greatly weakened the Cold War domestic consensus, and left a legacy that largely discouraged presidents from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton from undertaking major ground combat. Whereas George Bush did employ a US-led coalition to forcibly eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, Operation Desert Storm's goal was strictly limited to restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty in the aftermath of a classic act of aggression. The Iraq War that was initiated in 2003 (Operation Iraqi Freedom) has divided the American public more deeply than any conflict since Vietnam, significantly eroded the domestic consensus that arose in the wake of 9/11, and threatens to leave a legacy that will deter future presidents from seeking to forcibly impose regime change on other nations.

The Vietnam War also did much to alter significantly the Cold War procedural consensus. Important structural changes in Congress made it much more difficult for presidents to strike and enforce deals by working with a handful of senior legislative leaders. Stripped of many of their old privileges and prerogatives by the reform movement of the early 1970s, these leaders found it more difficult to deliver votes on presidential foreign policy initiatives.

Sine the Cold War, private corporations are being relied on to Satisfy foreign policy objectives during the mid-1960s, the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson quietly authorized a consortium of four large corporations to put in place an enormous modern military construction programme that would transform southern Vietnam and 'modernize' its physical infrastructure.

After Vietnam strong domestic support was deemed essential. Media coverage and media containment were crucial throughout the 1980s and 1990s, especially on US casualties, but also on unnecessary civilian casualties and bombing errors that produced adverse reaction.

Though Bush's support was initially high even while the initial stages of the invasion were taking place, opinion began to shift as the US weighed the costs of the war and considered the casualties. That overall decline in support was more or less steady as time went on.

Note:All these are notes made on parts of the books studied for the paper. All books quoted are in the bibliography.

In the modern way of knowing, there have to be images for something to become \"real.\" ... For a war, an atrocity, a pandemic ... to become a subject of large concern, it has to reach people through the various systems (from television and the Internet to newspapers and magazines) that diffuse photographic images to millions. (Sontag 2003: R16) Cases ranging from Vietnam and Somalia to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal strongly support Sontag's argument. As an Israeli Minister of Information wrote, \"Without television, you cannot have a war\" (Hiebert 1995:335).