vietnam war
The Vietnam War (1955-1975) is probably the most problematic of all American wars. First, it is morally ambiguous. It was both a war against communism and a war to suppress nationalist self-determination. Second, it can be (and was) very confusing. American objectives were not always well defined. As a result, US policy often meandered: the US would "Americanize" the war only to "Vietnamize" it five years later. Third, things in the Vietnam War were often not what they seemed. In the name of protecting democracy, the US propped up Diem's dictatorial regime. The American media sometimes represented tactical victories as terrible defeats. The US military often kept very accurate body counts of the number of vietkong killed without any clear method of determining which Vietnamese really were Vietcong and which were svn allies.To attempt to make sense of US involvement in Vietnam, the war must be considered in a larger context: the Cold War. The US and USSR were in the midst of a struggle over spheres of influence, each wanting to exert cultural, political, and ideological control over various regions of the globe; part of the effort to gain spheres of influence was a complementary effort to stop the other country from gaining any
In the midst of the Cold War, the US, operating under a belief known as the Domino Theory, feared that with the "fall" of North Vietnam to Communism, all of Southeast Asia might fall, setting off a sort of Communist chain reaction. Within a year of the North Vietnam victory over the French, the US began to offer support to the anti-Communist ngo dinh diem helping him to take control of the South Vietnamese government, which he subsequently declared a republic. in his effort to wrest control of South Vietnam from bao dai the US supported a series of weak and corrupt proxy governments in South Vietnam in order to prevent the extension of Communist influence in indochina. The US supplied these South Vietnam governments with military as well as advisory support, and in 1963 went so far as to help organize a coup of ngo dinh diem's government in favor of a regime the western powers felt would be able to withstand communist pressure. . American military advisors, technological superiority, massive bombing campaigns and combat troops were unable to crush the Vietnamese communists, whose guerilla tactics proved remarkably resilient. As the US shifted to a policy of detente in the early 1970s, American policymakers struggled to find a way to withdraw from Vietnam without losing face. By 1973 that process was complete, and in 1975 North Vietnamese armies conquered saigon, the southern capital. The escalation period of the Vietnam War, which lasted between 1955-1965, also foncromed to the Cold War model, in which the US and USSR avoided direct conflict and thereby avoided the possib
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1067
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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