Why did the usa intervene in vietnam(1965-73)when the vietnam war started?

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Who wants to know

There wasn't anything that the US needed to intervene. The same lame excuse that they use now is that they have to fight abroad before it (communism) gets to the US. The US (supposedly) was afraid that communism would spread through South East Asia.

Our president Ngo Dinh Diem refused to let the US come to Vietnam. He was afraid that the present of the US would give North Vietnamese a good reason to fight with South Vietnam and he was right. As soon as the US set foot in Vietnam, North Vietnamese created a National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) - an insurgent organization fighting against the Republic of Vietnam and the US.

With their determination and discipline, North Vietnam won the war and kicked the US out of Vietnam after the US abandoned South Vietnam. That wasn't a popular war because the American public didn't believe in killing innocent people when they did nothing to the US. The Tet offensive humiliated the US and when the (US) soldiers came back home, they were not welcome.

ong jon

i truely believe our leaders truly believed in the "domino therory" they feared communisim.... and they thought if vn fell to the commies .. so would all s/e asia..guess we were wrong..

SkyKing

the US didn't "intervene"....they are the one tat caused......

Prenn

I'm glad that they got their *** kicked. The US should never been there in the beginning.

ThuhaH

Strange how the Yanks are so against Weapons of mass destruction, yet they are always the first to use them. They used chemical weapons in Vietnam and the Vietnamese are still suffering because of it, yet they made no offers to help.
My young sister died of lung cancer because of their chemicals.

Madison

There wasn't anything to intervene. The US was and is always in someone else's business. No wonder they lost every time. Never learned, have they?

boy l

ac.ac.

Dave

The US intervened in Vietnam in support of its main foreign policy objective of the Cold War -- the containment of communism. The US assumed, incorrectly as later events proved, that if one country "fell" to communism, then others would inevitably follow (the Domino theory), and that this would weaken the US relative to the Soviet Union.

Though the US saw the war as part of its struggle against communism, it also overestimated the degree to which Vietnamese nationalism was rooted in communism. The US saw Ho Chi Minh as a committed communist and a Soviet puppet. In reality, his main goals were to end foreign occupation, and to set himself up as Vietnam's ruler. Ho Chi Minh used communism as means to organize his people and obtain foreign assistance -- a means to an end, not necessarily an end in of itself.

Thus, US involvement in Vietnam was based on two major incorrect assumptions - primarily the Domino theory of the spread of communism, and secondarily an overestimation of the communist component of Vietnamese nationalism.

* Have to respectfully disagree with the (mostly rhetorical) post that describes President Diem as a good Vietnamese nationalist Diem was almost universally hated. He was brutal towards northern communists and southern Buddhists alike, and he was very corrupt. Even the US, who didn't so much mind brutality towards communists, eventually found his excesses to be intolerable. The only people who supported Diem were the South Vietnamese elites who benefited from his misdeeds.

African Farmer

That's a topic covered in history books ... it relates to cold war issues (Bay of Pigs, fear of world dominance by the communist block, the domino theory) ... and it is also covered in Wiki.

President John F. Kennedy increased America's troop numbers from 500 to 16,000, and President Lyndon Johnson dispatched a large number of troops beginning in 1965. Almost all U.S. military personnel departed after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. The last American troops left the country on April 30, 1975.

When John F. Kennedy won the 1960 U.S. presidential election, one major issue Kennedy raised was whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the U.S. As Kennedy took over, despite warnings from Eisenhower about Laos and Vietnam, Europe and Latin America "loomed larger than Asia on his sights." In his inaugural address, Kennedy made the ambitious pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."

In June 1961, John F. Kennedy bitterly disagreed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev when they met in Vienna over key U.S.-Soviet issues.
Cold war strategists concluded Southeast Asia would be one of the testing ground where Soviet forces would test the USA's containment policy - begun during the Truman Administration and solidified by the stalemate resulting from the Korean War.

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