U.S. Involvement In The Vietnam War example essay topic

Though out history, American has had its hand in conflict with other countries. Some of those conflicts have turned out into wars. Looking back at America's "track record" with war, America has a worthy past of having its citizen's support. Obviously the two World Wars we not controversial. The United States in the Korean War was criticized, fairly, for its strategy, but the need to defend South Korea was never questioned. In only the Vietnam War was the United States' very participation criticized.

This is such a gigantic change with prior wars that it bears study as to why it happened, and better yet, should have it happened. This paper will discuss the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, by asking the simple question, Should have the Untied States' gotten involved into the first place. This paper will prove that in fact, America should have not gotten involved with the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War took place in between 1947-1975. It consisted of North Vietnam trying to make South Vietnam a communism government. The United States later joined this conflict because of the stress North Vietnam was putting to South Vietnam to become a government that America did not want.

The main reason why America joined was because of a theory called the Domino Effect. America and Russia were going through what has been dubbed the Cold War. The Domino Effect is the theory that communism will spread form one country to another. United states does not want this because our government is a democracy and communism opposes everything we stand for. America fearing communism was growing, stepped into Vietnam with America's interest in mind, instead of Vietnam's. There are several reason why American should have not gotten involved with this war.

The most important reason was that America government officials made to much of a big deal about communism. This might sound cynical, but America to a certain degree did over react. Let it be said that it is much easier to say this after the fact. By looking back at McCarthyism, we can see the silliness of this fear. There is a serious side though. Thousands of people dies for a government that has no impact of their daily life.

What regime Vietnam was going to change over to had no effect on the every day cycle of the United States. So truly, one can say, this can not one thing to do with America, its government and people. Another reason why Vietnam never should have involved the united states was the death toll. 2,000,000 veterans served in Vietnam. Of that 58,135 veterans died and 300,000 (153,303 from combat) veterans were wounded and 2,267 were POW / MIA. This is an outstanding number of deaths since this wasn't even a "war".

Men died fighting for a case that did not effect them. And speaking of the men, 86% of those who died during the war were white and 12.5% were black (from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1% of the population). This is really peculiar because at this time African-Americans were fighting for their freedom rights but instead they are sent to die for a country in which wont let them drink from the same water fountain with? This is absurd. But we still fought, dies and came bac to do it all over again, fight for rights in our home. Another reason to disagree with this war is the simple fact of how the government recognized their mistakes in the first place.

By this, the government knew the major pitfalls in the conflict and so, made laws that "fixed" or prevented this sort of chaos from happening again. One thing the government changed was that the U.S. would no longer be the 'world's policeman,' which was how we viewed ourselves since WWII. The U.S. would no longer habitually jump militarily into the affairs of other countries, even if there were major problems there, including Communist uprisings or human rights violations. Another action that was to cease after Vietnam was that the U.S. government would make more careful analysis before entering political theaters.

We had the chance to stay out of the Vietnam War, and we had enough information to know we should stay out. The political cry would now be 'no more Vietnam". We also learned that before we entered a theater, we had to have exit strategies. This was not an excellent idea, and that is why these set theories were adapted.

Next thing U.S. adapted in policy was the recognition of the limits of military power. We learned that 'stopping wars requires settling the political questions over which they are fought. ' Strategic bombing, limited war, search-and-destroy strategies, the support of corrupt indigenous governments -- all proved useless in Vietnam. We would now fight 'only where U.S. goals were clear, public support assured, power overwhelming, and thus victory certain.

' There have been fair arguments against the theories presented here. They might disagree with the way of just ignored the conflicts going on aboard. The truth is that at that time where we were presented with this conflict, we had too many internal conflicts to be worried about what was going on within a country's government. While doing this paper, question did arise to make studying more about the topic a necessity. Why did we indeed fight in Vietnam? The are some surface, concrete answers, but truly, who made the decision.

What was going through their minds? Would America been different if we decided not to fight in the Vietnam War? That question doesn't have a clear answer, but America would have now have a more clean past with our government..