Policy Of Military Action example essay topic

vietnam war. How did Vietnam happen? How Vietnam happened is a question that has fascinated historians and political and social scientists to our day. What has been hard to conceive is that how the United States, a country of military superpower, could not win in Vietnam.

There are so many ways to approach in order to answer this question. However, it is simplistic to attribute this failure to one single cause. Is it the overall foreign policy that was adopted towards the crisis? Is it the way the certain foreign policy was not implemented the way it should have been? Or was it interpreted wrongly?

Is it personal inefficiencies and psychological flaws of the executives of the time? We can come up with so many other questions to answer this phenomenon but the reason I want to limit them to these is that these are the main causes that have resulted in so many other subliminal causes. The overall foreign policy is the containment of communism. What has caused the failure of the United States is the combination of two things; wrong interpretation and consequently wrong implementation, and inefficiencies of the executives. Since the wrong policy approach is the action of the executives, we can reduce the causes to the administrative failure represented in the persona of President Lyndon B. Johnson. His relentless adherence to military option has blinded him to consider other policy options and instead made him get bogged down in this quagmire.

The very first step that was taken was the policy of military action. What might have caused the administration to adopt such a policy are probably as follows: a new breed of military strategists and social scientists had developed counter-guerilla warfare and were eager to test them or the legacy of McCarthy era and the fear of looking soft on communism, all of which gave the way to pressures for military solution. The tight circle of decision making group experienced little airing of policy differences. The administration kept decision making circle extremely small. The misperception about breaking the will of North Vietnam by air-bombing them caused the administration and military strategists to an unending engagement and escalation that it was almost impossible for them to admit failure militarily. One of the greatest flaws of the human psychology is to fail to admit failure.

It is too difficult for one to come to the terms with one's mistake. What makes it more difficult is the status one enjoys as a president of a superpower and a potential world leader country such as the United States. It is true that the decision making was not limited to an individual, but it represented a cohesive body (since they were all in on it) of people that was ignorant to what others might offer as policy options. What is interesting is that how or why those individuals in that decision making body became cohesive. I believe that different viewpoints were being presented towards different questions, but in the end, a single policy choice was being adopted. To me the most tenable argument as to why they were cohesive is the overwhelming notion of unity.

This notion makes one believe in the rightness of action. This way they were able to justify their action and at the same time reduce the volume of opposition. They have domesticated the dissenters and also dissenters fell in the effectiveness trap. They also needed to further consolidate this justification in the eyes of the public. This made them adopt some political rhetoric and the policy of overselling. Failure to admit failure stems from narrow minded political ambitions.

Every politician pursues what will get him reelected. President Johnson inadvertently had to display a successful performance in order to get reelected. To achieve his goal, he had to win the people's support and it was linked to his performance in Vietnam policy. But the single policy mistake he had made in the beginning led him to make other mistakes. He could have admitted his mistake in the beginning and reversed the course in his and the nation's and the Vietnamese's favor, for it was still the beginning of his term.

But there were also international concerns to be taken into account. Namely the United States' credibility to aid those allied with it or to show the stick to communist ambitions. What caused the Vietnam was then the administration's staunch adherence to military power. And what made the administration stick with this option is the failure to admit failure for political aspirations. For only when President Johnson made up his mind not to seek reelection, was he able to come to terms with the facts and adopt the policy of de-escalation.

What is more and stark evidence of this argument is probably the wide public backlash that developed throughout the country and was the only factor that made the administration revise its policy in Vietnam. For nothing short of such a thing seemed possibly to draw attention..