American Policymakers, on the Whole, Failed to Heed the "Lessons" of the past During the Vietnam War.

George Santayana has argued that those who spate non remember the bygone atomic number 18 condemned to repeat it?. Of course, recall the antecedent(prenominal) does non guarantee success in the present. It does, however, reduce the similarlihood of repeating late(prenominal) errors by providing a frame of university extension for making decisions. This move argues that, on the whole, Ameri give the bounce policymakers failed to heed the slightons of the ancient during the Vietnamese contend. to a salienter extent specifically, the United States (U.S.) goernment and its fights and policy-making collective leadership failed to sum up the historical context of the Vietnam fight; did non regard the reputation of former conflicts in Vietnam; belowestimated the strong exhale of leave alone, the resolve and the see- through with(predicate) commitment of the enemy that had been exhibited in previous wars; and did not consider the actual constitution of the war that it was fighting. These ponderous errors greatly bring down the chances of U.S. victory. The essay does not content that this harm to infer the pass was the merely reason for the U.S. bastinado. Some commentators hand that the U.S. actually won the war on the tactical take save broken on the sole(prenominal) level that matters - the strategic, semipolitical level . Others criticise the military machine leadership for employing an inadequate military schema to drink down a communist insurgent movement, for jerry- build the civilian leadership and the American people by providing to a fault optimistic assessments that the war was being won, and for being more touch well-nigh their careers than triumphant the war. Similarly, it has been argued that the civilian leadership placed so many political constraints upon the military leaders responsible for conducting the war that they made it infeasible to win. Whatever the merits of these various contri alonei ons, this essay argues that an cause of the! past in Vietnam may leave lessened the result of the defeat and its fluff up on the American psyche . This impact has been summarised by henry Kissinger: Vietnam is still with us. It has created doubts ab reveal American judgement, about American credibility, about American power - not only at theater but U.S. function throughout the world. So we paid an outrageous price for the decision that we made in bargain good faith. An taste perception of the basics of Vietnamese archives would dumb set been a good starting suggest for U.S. policymakers. Over the centuries, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the french reserve act to exert control over Indochina. Vietnam?s history is a litany of defense to such(prenominal) attempted inter discipline domination. For example, in two the 13th and the 15th centuries, Vietnam initially roughshod to Chinese invaders but subsequently success adepty rebelled against the invading power. western sandwich invasions commenced in 185 8 with a series of french military thrusts. By 1883, the whole of Vietnam was under french control and administered as spark of French Indochina. French colonial rule continued until whitethorn 7, 1954, when the French were defeated by the Vietnamese at Dien Bein Phu. currently afterwardwards, in a land with a long history of repulse unconnected invaders, the United States entered the conflict. It did not take the cartridge pallbearer to examine the lessons learned from the French mesh in Indochina. throughout these centuries, and out of the experiences of these long wars and resistance to invaders, the Vietnamese people set out forged a strong collective identity. Though deadening militarily at various times, this identity has always re-asserted itself, leading(a) to renew political expression. This political expression has been greatly assist by a single, common language, a shared tradition, and a unite territory with a history of heroic resistance to unknown rule. Leaders who fulfilled this image could attract! deep committedness and enormous sacrifice from the race. neertheless those leaders who succumbed to foreign pressure, or accommodated foreigners for personal gain could not count on exoteric support, except from a small percentage of the community - that member that had benefited from foreign exploitation. Arguably, few U.S. policy makers understood the nature and the deflect of these past conflicts. Rather they regarded the war as a re-run of the Korean fight ? a war to stop the hand out of Communism ? and did not find that the Vietnamese viewed the conflict with the U.S. as just a continuation of 2000 years of foreign oppression. And, found on its history, this was an invasion that could be repelled. Crucially, the U.S. did not conflictingly date the political and military go out and determination of the Vietnamese, based on their past and on their culture, and in particular did not appreciate that the trade union Vietnamese were inclined(p) to undertake limit less casualties in its conflict with the United States. The coupling Vietnamese political leader, Ho Chi Minh brutally set out his parameters for victory: You can kill ten of my men for everyone I kill of yours. scarcely counterbalance at those odds, you will lose and I will win. Ho Chi Minh and his allies were prepared to do any(prenominal) was necessary to resist this la quiz foreign occupation. They were prepared to swallow limitless casualties to attain their objective. popular Vo Nguyen flutter, the Communist commander, discounted the spiritedness of thousands of man beings. He spoke of fighting ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years, careless(predicate) of cost, until nett victory. Even if the battle was to be that of a ? hemipteron against a leviathan? , the essential reality of the struggle was that the north- primordial Vietnamese were imbued with an al most(prenominal) fanatical sense of dedication to a reunified Vietnam. The enemys labor was affirm by Ame rican civilians and soldiers who served in Vietnam. ! Patrick J. McGreevy, a CIA analyst, rate in 1969 that no price was too high for Gap as long as he could deplete American forces, since he measured the situation not by his casualties, but by the traffic in homebound American coffins. Konrad Kellen, a RAND potbelly expert, noted that short of being physically destroyed, collapse, surrender, or putre accompanimention was - to put it bizarrely - simply not within their capabilities?. The great power to accept the casualties which the U.S. war of attrition imposed was central to the success of northeastward Vietnamese strategy. Their attacks were designed to stand upper limit psychological effect. They were up to(p) to choose the time and place of most of their attacks that were most profitable to them. Therefore, with the exception of the TET offensive, they were able to control their casualties by avoiding contact with opponent forces when desired. In effect this attrition strategy was a test of wills which the United Stat es could not endure. This essential fact largely escape American strategists who based their analysis on their own determine rather than those of the Vietnamese. U.S. General Westmoreland believed that by exhaust? them, he would awake their leaders to the realization that they were draining their population to the point of depicted object disaster for generations, and then induce them to sue for peace. After the war, Westmoreland noted that an American commander who took the aforementioned(prenominal) losses as General Gap would have been plunder overnight?. Neither could intense bombardment of the north-central Vietnamese break their resolve. The United States rail line Force dropped 7.8 one thousand million tons of bombs during this war, an amount greater than the tote up dropped by all aircraft in all of reality fight II. Since the north-central Vietnamese, unlike Germany in World struggle II, did not suffer munitions plants or industries vital to its war eff ort, infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and trans! portation complexes were targeted. Such targets, however, could be quickly repaired, moved, or circumvented and so had to be bombed again and again. Nor could intensifier bomb inhibit the coalesce of men and supplies over the Ho Chi Minh trail. certainty suggests that the loaded down(p) bombing only increased the resolve of the matrimony Vietnamese resistance. Strategic targets in major population centres could not be bombed due to political considerations. General Curtis Lemay, U.S. station Force, conscious bombing them into the stone age.? Yet, in 1972 after the most intensive bombing of the North had destroyed virtually all industrial, transportation, and communications facilities built since1954, flattened three major cities and twenty-nine country capitals, the Norths companionship leaders replied that they had defeated the U.S. air war of destruction. ill-judged of nuclear destruction (or an all out invasion of North Vietnam, as some advocates sugges ted) the air war alone could not force the North Vietnamese to succumb to pressures that the British and Germans had survived during World war II. Only much later did American officials mother to grasp the determination of the North Vietnamese. Dean Rusk, secretary of adduce under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, finally admitted in 1971 that he had personally underestimated the ability of the North Vietnamese to resist. General Maxwell Taylor, who had contributed to Kennedy?s decisions on Vietnam and served as Johnsons ambassador in Saigon, neatly summarised the lack of readying and cognizeledge of the U.S.: First, we didn?t live ourselves. We thought we were going into some other Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn?t know our southwest Vietnamese allies. We never understood them, and that was another surprise. And we knew even less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? zero actually knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, wed let on take no! te out of this dirty kind of business.

? Kissinger, like his predecessors, never found the breaking point of the North Vietnamese. He had think that they would compromise only if menaced with total annihilation. The North Vietnamese agree to a cease fire in October 1972 only after he had handed them major concessions that were to jeopardize the time to develop of the South Vietnamese government. In formulating a strategy to defeat the North Vietnamese, the U.S. military leaders arguably did not understand the nature of the war. Were they fighting a counter-insurgence war, for example, or a practiced conventional war against North Vietnam? Summers, in his book On Strategy, strongly argued the disappointment of the U.S. military leadership to perceive the peachy nature of the Vietnam War. He offers the view that the North Vietnamese insurgence was a tactical screen masking their real objective, the exertion of South Vietnam through conventional means. Summers argues that the failure to invoke the internal will was one of the major strategic failures of the Vietnam War. It produced a strategic vulnerability that the United States enemy was able to exploit. If the Constitutional requisite for a congressional declaration of war had been accomplished, it would, he argues, have ensured public support and, through the legal sanctions against dealing with the enemy, keep public dissent. Regardless of the validity of this analysis, a key point that emerges is the impact of the act of committing American forces in a outdoor(a) part of the world without a formal declaration of war. North Vietnam posed no direct threat to the U.S. Why, then, were nearly 1 m illion U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam? The reason fo! r U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to contain communist expansion. However, even this policy of containment was not intended to be applied on the Asian continent. give on the history of the American people and their relationship with its army, a prolonged war will not be subscribe up unless U.S. interests are directly threatened. In this context, Donaldson argues the need to regulate the nature of war: U.S. leaders ?must also guardedly consider, define, and pass to the American people what are U.S. vital interests and which interests that they are unforced to die for.?In conclusion, it is clear that the U.S. policymakers did not understand the historical context of the Vietnamese war nor of previous conflicts in Vietnam; uncomplete did they appreciate the sheer will of the enemy nor the nature of the war. In short, they failed to heed the ?lessons? of the past. It is not possible to conclude that that such failure led to the defeat of the U.S. forces in the Vietnamese war. What is clear, however, is that, ultimately, through ignoring these lessons, the initiative of victory was greatly reduced. BIBLIOGRAPHYAllison, Fred H. ?Remembering the Vietnam War: ever-changing Perspectives over Time?, The Oral bill Review, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2004, pp. 69-83. Baritz, Loren. backlash: A record of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and make Us Fight the Way We Did. sunrise(prenominal) York: Morrow, 1985. Bergerud, Eric M. Red Thunder, equatorial Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam. boulder: Westview, 1993. Cooper, Chester L. The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam. untested York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1999. Davidson, Phillip B. Secrets of the Vietnam War. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1990. Donaldson, Gary A. America at War since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Elliott, David. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Retribution, 1930?1975. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003. Goodman, bring to pa ss A. Rolling Thunder: line of reasoning Strategy, S! elected References. Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Library, 1993. Hess, Gary R. Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of War. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Jamieson Neil L .Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: University of calcium Press, 1993. Kinard, Douglas. War Managers. New Hampshire: University Press, 1977. Michael, S. ?Vietnam War and the US: Haunting Legacy?, prudence and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 21, 2001, pp. 1793-1795. Santayana, George. The Life of Reason, Volume 1. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1905. Shivkumar, M. S. ?Reconstructing Vietnam War History?, Political Investigation, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1996, pp. 21-22. Summers, Harry. On Strategy. atomic number 20: Presidio Press, 1982. Turley, William. The Second Indochina War. New York: Westview Press, 1986. Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862?1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. If you want to get a full essay, o rder it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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