The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. ... The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. The North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong viewed the conflict as a colonial war, fought initially against France, backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state.

Vietnam has a long history of oppression by western colonizers. The French colonial era lasted from 1858 to 1945. It was extended with French Indochina which lasted until 1954 when the French imperialists reluctantly left Vietnam. French colonial rule was, for the most part, politically repressive and economically exploitative.* Vietnam was important because it bordered China, an upcoming economic power which would eventually rival the United States.

Along with Lippmann and Morgenthau, Kennan, the great practitioner who first introduced the concept of containment, insists that the U.S. 'had... no business trying to play a role in the affairs of the mainland of Southeast Asia'.

Free world dominion over the region would provide markets for Japan, rebuilding with American help after the Pacific War. U.S. involvement in Vietnam reassured the British, who linked their postwar recovery to the revival of the rubber and tin industries in their colony of Malaya, one of Vietnam's neighbors.*

The main reason for the Vietnam War presented by the mainstream media is anti-communism. But the underlying reason for involvement in the Vietnam War had to do with power and imperialism. The end of World War II was the beginning of the Cold War in which the Anglo-American elite competed for power with the Soviet elite who were supported by China. An important reason for US involvement was geopolitical in nature. Vietnam borders China, an upcoming economic power with the potential to become a competitor on a global scale. It lies right next to the South China Sea which is a heavily disputed area. Around one-third of global shipping and about 21 percent of global trade moves through it. China uses this maritime route as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. This is of course not to the liking of the Anglo-American elite. With military bases in Vietnam the US could block and prevent China from this trade route and strengthen its own grip in Asia. Political theorist James Burnham viewed the war in Vietnam as part of a larger struggle for control of Southeast Asia and predominance in the Asia-Pacific region.*

French imperialism caused communism to rise in Vietnam. The Vietnamese patriots wanted to claim back the land and divide it among the Vietnamese population. Ho Chi Minh started a revolution. The US intervened.

Ngo Dinh Diem was the first president of South Vietnam (1955—1963). In the wake of the French withdrawal from Indochina as a result of the 1954 Geneva Accords, Diem led the effort to create the Republic of Vietnam. Accruing considerable US support due to his staunch anti-communism, he announced victory after a fraudulent 1955 plebiscite in which he won 600,000 votes from an electorate of 450,000 and began building a right-wing dictatorship in South Vietnam.

The top US officials in Vietnam tried to be optimistic, and tried to create the impression that Ngo Dinh Diem was a magnificent and popular leader who was winning the war. A few American reporters were saying that something was seriously wrong, but the US Embassy in Saigon did its best to discredit them.*

The US power elite supported and installed a dictatorship. In a letter from the US Ambassador in Vietnam to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs dated to May 1963 we read the following...

Foreseeable situations in which there might be a change in government are listed in ascending order of likelihood that U.S. interests would be adversely affected. A possible U.S. role is suggested for each situation. A. Diem retires before the end of his term and names Vice President as his constitutional successor.*

US officials in Saigon therefore began encouraging ARVN officers to overthrow Diem. ... The basic problem of the Saigon government--the incompetence and/or corruption of most of its officers--remained unchanged. ... While ARVN officers competed with one another for personal wealth and for political power in Saigon, the guerrillas continued to gain ground in the countryside.*

US puppet leader Diem could not be maintained any longer due to public knowledge of his brutal regime so he had to be eliminated. That was done by means of the 1963 South Vietnamese coup. He was replaced with another US puppet, namely General Duong Van Minh.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, also known as the USS Maddox Incident, is the name given to two separate confrontations involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying US conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam. ... It was originally claimed by the National Security Agency that the second Tonkin Gulf incident occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead may have involved "Tonkin ghosts" (false radar images) and not actual NVN torpedo boat attacks.

According to Patrick J. Paterson...

New documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.

The second Tonkin incident did not take place, it was a false flag used to seemingly justify their much wanted involvement in the war.

As President and Commander in Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply. The initial attack on the destroyer Maddox, on August 2, was repeated today by a number of hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes. The destroyers and supporting aircraft acted at once on the orders I gave after the initial act of aggression. We believe at least two of the attacking boats were sunk. There were no U.S. losses.

Lyndon B. Johnson was the perverted president who once ordered the White House shower to be directed at his private part.* On 7 August 1964 this pervert said about the Gulf of Tunkin incident: For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.* He admitted that the second Gulf of Tonkin incident never took place, but it got their war started. See also D. D. Guttenplan's article When presidents lie to make a war *.

The My Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. It was committed by the U.S. Army soldiers from the Company C Infantry Division. Victims included women, men, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated.

Twenty six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Second Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served only three and a half years under house arrest. US government officials turned a blind eye and tried to cover up the atrocity in another attempt to falsify history.

Involved in the cover-up was Colin Powell who at that time was army major and charged with investigating a letter describing ongoing and routine brutality against Vietnamese civilians on the part of American forces. Powell's handling of the assignment was later characterized by some observers as "whitewashing" the atrocities.* Colin Powell later became United States Secretary of State under George W. Bush and was responsible for the false evidence presented at the United Nations in order to create the support for the Iraq War, another aggressive war.

In 1971 the Pentagon Papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg showing that the Johnson Administration systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress. President Nixon tried to prevent publication after Henry Kissinger, an influential US foreign policy advisor and member of the Trilateral Commission, had warned that the papers were harmful.

It is now clear, after extensive research, that Nixon initiated the campaign to sabotage the My Lai massacre trials so no American soldier involved in the killings would be convicted of war crimes.*

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Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson have written about the War Crimes Working Group Files, using them to show that atrocities were more extensive than had been officially acknowledged. One of Nick Turse's books reads: ...violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves. Historian Marshall Poe wrote a book called The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War. A summary reads: using detailed survey of the American press, governmental records, and academic treatments of My Lai over the period 1968 to the present, Poe analyzes the origins and history of the commonplace that there were "many My Lais." Professor of History and Vietnam War veteran Earl H. Tilford, Jr. said: since the 1960s, our moral compass has been skewed.* As if that moral compass wasn't skewed before that.

Napalm ... is an American weapon: it was invented in America and has been used longer, more widely, and to greater effect by the United States than any other country. ... this is a story of America, from global authority at the end of World War II to its increasingly constrained position in a globalizing world.*

Napalm was used extensively by the US in incendiary attacks on Japanese cities in World War II as well as during the Korean War and Vietnam War.

By the first half of 1964, it was clear that the Communists were winning the war. ... South Vietnam became, by a wide margin, the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world. ... The war was an unusually brutal and savage one. ... Most of the casualties the Americans suffered were inflicted by ambushes, night attacks, mines, and booby traps. ... On the other hand, when a Communist was killed or wounded it was generally done by bombing planes...*

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On top of that the United States power elite made extensive use of Agent Orange as part of its chemical warfare program called Operation Ranch Hand*. In addition to its damaging environmental effects, traces of dioxin found in the mixture have caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed.

In the Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now US Colonel Walter E. Kurtz said: We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!

When the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers on 13 June 1971, Americans became aware of the true nature of the war. Stories of drug trafficking, political assassinations, and indiscriminate bombings led many to believe that military and intelligence services had lost all accountability.*

During the war the majority of people turned against the war. All this opposition to the war was not to the liking of the Anglo-American power elite. The opinion of the people eventually made them act in a way as could be expected from an authoritarian oligarchy. They started a war against the anti-war movement, against "their own" American people...

The United States power elite used their intelligence apparatus against their opponents and against their own population in order to shut down any opposition to the war. See also for example Operation COINTELPRO, Project MINARET, Operation CHAOS. At the Kent State shootings on 4 May 1970 the police shot unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four and wounding nine.

Our policy in Southeast Asia has been consistent and unchanged since 1954. I summarized it on June 2 in four simple propositions: 1. America keeps her word. Here as elsewhere, we must and shall honor our commitments; 2. The issue is the future of Southeast Asia as a whole. A threat to any nation in that region is a threat to all, and a threat to us; 3. Our purpose is peace. We have no military, political, or territorial ambitions in the area; 4. This is not just a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity. Our military and economic assistance to South Vietnam and Laos in particular has the purpose of helping these countries to repel aggression and strengthen their independence.*

Can it get any more hypocritical than the president of the United States?

Robert S. McNamara, the forceful and cerebral defense secretary who helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam... was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales.*

After the Vietnam War Robert McNamara said...

We in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.*

Robert McNamara is regarded as the architect of the Vietnam War. In a TV documentary and interview called The Fog of War he said: War is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.* War sure is complex. It is military-industrial complex. And intelligent people like Robert know all about it. Robert was just another professional liar of the vilest kind who admitted his terrible mistakes when the lies were really no longer tenable.

Normally, we tend to assume that in a war of attrition, the side that is inflicting the greater number of casualties on its enemy is winning. In Vietnam, the United States enjoyed huge advantages in weapons, technology, and logistics, and furthermore was able to use those advantages quite effectively; the notion that the American forces were unable to make their technology relevant on the battlefield is a myth. The result was that the number of men who died while serving in the Communist forces was over ten times the number who died in the American forces. Nonetheless, it was the Communists who ultimately won the war of attrition against the Americans.*

Each side suffered and inflicted huge losses, with the civilian populace suffering horribly. Based on widely varying estimates, between 1.5 and 3.6 million people were killed in the war.