United States Failure in the Vietnam War

The American military intercession in Vietnam delayed but ultimately failed to prevent the dousing of southwest Vietnam by the Hanoi regime. The principal reasons for that failure were: (a) the political instability, corruption and narrow popular appeal of the South Vietnamese government, which could not maintain itself in power without massive American military involvement; (b) the implacable determination of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong to come upon the forcible unification of Vietnam under their rule, which the Americans underestimated; (c) declining support for the war in the United States; and (d) the ineffectiveness of American military strategy.

As Morrison says, for some(prenominal) centuries, "Vietnamese history is a continuing story of resisting attack --mostly by armies from China." Before the French were finally forced to appropriate after their defeat by the communist Vietminh at the involvement of Dienbienphu in 1954, French rule in Indochina (1860-1954) was generally unpopular with Vietnamese because of its exploitative and oppressive nature. During the Japanese occupation of French Indochina (1940-1945), the Vietnamese communists seized effective control of the nationalist movement. After shortly establishing an independent republic in Hanoi

As he explained his domino theory to the press on April 7, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower viewed the preservation of a non-communist South Vietnam as a vital interest of the United States: "if someone sets up a row of dominoes, and knocks over the first one . . . it is certain that the closing one will go over very quickly." However, Eisenhower refused to countenance American ground troops or even institutionalize strikes to be used to aid the French at Dienbienphu. Kennedy was in any case chary of expanding the war. With Hanoi's support, the communist National Liberation Front in the South and its military arm, the Viet Cong, initiated in 1959 a campaign of outlandishfied assassinations and kidnappings of village chiefs.

According to Shaplen, by 1961 they had succeeded to the point "where security in the countryside had become a serious problem and the government was in trouble." Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced his support for wars of national liberation. Kennedy clear expanded American military and economic support and counterinsurgency efforts, which increased the number of American military advisors in country from 900 in 1960 to 16,300 by the end of 1963. According to Halberstam, Kennedy "knew the dangers of a unintelligible U. S. involvement, the limits of what Caucasian troops could achieve on Vietnamese soil, and to that extent he deepened that commitment." Since, as Edmonds said, "most American policy makers aphorism the Diem government as unpopular and ineffective," the United States covertly authorise the coup which led to the overthrow and murder by the South Vietnamese military of Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in November 1963. Thereafter, a succession of five makeshift military and military-backed governments produced even to a greater extent instability. McNamara speculates that, "had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam."

McNamara excessively acknowledged that the United States "underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people . . . to fight and die for thei
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