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Viet Nam
Brief Analytical Glance at Ho Chi Minh, Politics & American Historical Purpose
Making sense of Vietnam is difficult because the war was at a minimum a three-actor event, wherein each player had different purposes. ... For the North Vietnamese,
the war was one of total political purpose that required the complete resources of the people, and the purpose was hardly less desperate for the leadership of South Vietnam. Vietnam was, in other words, a war of asymmetrical purpose: the outcome was clearly more important to Americas adversaries than it was to Americans.
The political objective of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), embodied in Ho Chi Minh, was the unification of Vietnam under its rule, by force if necessary. As such, it was a total and indivisible goal, just as American independence had been in the eighteenth century. ... When Ho announced Vietnamese independence in 1945, he pre-empted the mantle of Vietnamese nationalism, a potent force in a country that had known millennia of existence and that had a long history of repelling foreign invaders. The problem for the United States, of course, was that Ho was also a Communist (and this occured at a high point in the Cold War). ...
The goal of the various governments of South Vietnam was to avoid being absorbed by the North. Because overarching Vietnamese nationalism (where it existed) was identified with Ho Chi Minh, the leaders in the South could not embrace the idea of unification under their own control; the support base was not there. ...
From what I have learned, the first reason was that maintaining the freedom of South Vietnam was a defense of artificiality. ... Ho Chi Minh was the embodiment of Vietnamese independence, the George Washington of his country, because of his role in ridding the land of the French colonialists. No one in South Vietnam had that kind of reputation or popularity. ... The fact that US forces and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) rarely conducted joint operations (the US command did not trust the fighting ability of the ARVN) simply added to this image. One of the cruelties of the war resulted from this identification; most American fighting men viewed their role in Vietnam as that of liberator of a suppressed population from communism, and they did not understand why the Vietnamese appeared ungrateful for their effort. ...
The exact nature of the American political objective is considerably more complex than the objectives of the indigenous combatants.
Approximate Word count = 2019
Approximate Pages = 8.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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