How did america blunder into the vietnam war with unclear objectives?

Question

How did america blunder into the vietnam war with unclear objectives?

Answer 1

Vietnam -- much like Iraq -- had clear objectives.  They were just ridiculous, practically impossible, and not stable enough to support a conflict costing thousands of soldier's lives for.

Answer 2

The U. S. based their objectives in Vietnam on the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and the Korean War in 1950.

The blunder was that Vietnam was neither one of those countries.

The blunder was recognizing Ngo Dinh Diem's dictatorship in the south of Vietnam and the "Republic of Vietnam" as either democratic or a nation.

The blunder was not recognizing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh, as a sovereign and independent nation under its own leadership.

Answer 3

Sounds familiar, does it not?

Answer 4

Ask ten different people this question and you'll get ten different answers, because even after forty years the Vietnam War is still a complicated question.

The truth is that there's probably no definitive answer; there are probably many good answers to it, so I'll give you a few answers, in no particular order.

First, 1960's America was a crazy-quilt of different viewpoints (much like today), but during the 1950's, the Cold War against the Russians had been blown out of proportion--communists had been turned by politicians and by the media into the biggest boogeyman you've ever seen. Communists (or, commies, as some people called them) were supposedly out to destroy absolutely everything. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had even written a book about it, "A Study in Communism", and a lot of people swore by it. So, stopping the Commies was supposedly America's Great Duty! And when Ho Chi Minh announced that North Vietnam was Communist, it naturally followed that we had to be the ones to stop him.

Then there were the people in power. One of the big figures in government at the time was a fellow by the name of John Foster Dulles--the same guy that Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. is named after. He served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, and was responsible for a whole lot of covert operations, including the CIA operations to overthrow the democratic Mossadegh government of Iran in 1953 (Operation Ajax). He also authored a paper which put forth what became known as "The Domino Theory" which stated that if one country were allowed to become communist, all the neighboring countries would immediately fall under communist control, too, like a row of dominoes. A lot of people at the time believed that, although it's largely been disproven now.

Then there was the fact that following World War II, the American government was filled with Hubris. People felt that America could do anything, so this small little country like Vietnam, they could never stand up to our powerful military might, could they? Pride and Jinogism, that kept a lot of people believing the war could be won, especially self-aggrandizing politicians.

That same pride also blinded a lot of people to what Vietnam really was like. Even when soldiers got there, almost none of them spoke the language, and those that did largely spent there time talking to ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers. No one really talked to the people to find out what their needs were. Those few who did found that the people didn't want American forces there at all. This led to confusion and resentment among Americans over what the real mission in Vietnam was.

And again, because so few knew what the mission was, there was virtually no intelligence network amongst the native Vietnamese. There were no spy networks, no wire diagrams detailing which NVA agents reported to whom. Everything was taken verbatim by people chosen by the ARVN officers, many of whom were sleeper agents themselves.

To the politicians and the Pentagon, the Vietnam War was part of the Cold War; a World War III by proxy. But to the Vietnamese, it was a civil war, and the Americans were butting-in where they weren't wanted.

President Johnson placed strict rules on the Pentagon forces, for fear that widening the war would bring China into the war on the side of the NVA. This placed severe restrictions on the kinds of warfare American soldiers could fight, which probably contributed to the U.S. defeat.

The revelations provided by Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers proved that the so-called Gulf on Tonkin Incident (an attack on U.S. Naval vessels by Vietnamese forces) never occurred, which meant that the U.S. deliberately lied in order to go to war anyway.

There are a few answers. But though you may research a thousand books by a thousand different authors, I doubt you will find the one real answer. Nevertheless, I hope I've helped.

Answer 5

The objectives were clear: To contain Communism, and eventually obtain a ceasefire (similar to what happened between North and South Korea), between a Communist North Vietnam and a democratic South Vietnam.

Now, whether the South Vietnamese masses really wanted us there, how to win the war with such unfamiliar conditions, and (every year) whether we should continue in such a harmful conflict, and whether we shold be involved at all....THOSE things were completely unclear.