Similarities And Differences In Vietnam

Similarities and differences of Vietnam from other U.S. foreign interventions The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War was a Cold war-era proxy war fought between 1950 and 1975. It was a long drawn out and complex war that resulted in high casualties on each side along with the eventually unification of Vietnam. It marked the end of a decades of invasion and oppression by foreign forces in Vietnam. The French colonized the region in 1887 and held on until World War Two when the Japanese took over control, after the war the French returned to Vietnam. The French return didn’t last long as WWII had shown colonies across the globe their European oppressors where not as great and all powerful as they portrayed themselves. Immediately …show more content…
U.S. involvement stays limited in Vietnam until 1955 when Eisenhower sends more military advisors to South Vietnam. The following years include failed national elections, failed unification, escalating tensions, assassinations and military actions. By the time Kennedy is assassinated in 1963 he has raised the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 900 to 16,000. The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 provided the U.S. an excuse to roll out a large escalation of the Vietnam War. From the following year until 1968 Operation Rolling Thunder among others is carried out dropping millions of pounds of bombs on North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The creep into Cambodia and Laos was not welcome by the American public and lead to widespread protests across America. This was cumulated by the 1970 Kent State Shooting which only lead to even greater anti war sentiment in the U.S. By this time the American troops had been in Vietnam for over a decade. At home the public were tired of hearing about and seeing dead U.S. soldiers in the news. There was very little support for the Vietnam War in the early seventies. U.S. presidents had tried to emphasize the importance of the war due to America’s pledge to help the …show more content…
withdrawal from Vietnam and public aversion to war in the U.S. led to the “Vietnam Syndrome.” A mix of beliefs from avoiding foreign wars and interventions and that if the U.S. went to war it would only lead to another deadly expensive lost war. The term was prevalent through the 1970’s and 80’s until after the First Gulf War when George H.W. Bush famously declared “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula… By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” (Debusmann) The memories of Vietnam were still in the minds of the U.S. in the lead up to the First Gulf War. When Iraq led a full scale invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 there was wide spread condemnation of the invasion and support of Kuwait. The UN condemned the invasion and security council members passed sanctions on Iraq. The widespread support of Kuwait and U.S. decisions to intervene was starkly different from Vietnam. This time it was an obvious invasion of Kuwait’s territorial sovereignty and the majority of the world agreed with the U.S. in the need to intervene. The overwhelming support was shown when the U.S. led coalition into Kuwait peaked at 34 countries, making it the largest military alliance since WWII (Swarts). The U.S. was not going to make the mistake of going into a foreign war without widespread support. At home George Bush tried to rally support for the war, initially support was divided but immediately after war