What did the US and its allies want during the Vietnam War?


 Unlike most wars we have unique insight into the actual US reasons for the Viet Nam war due to the fact that various papers were stolen which showed internal US government discussions and memos to the president of the US explicitly stating various goals and operations of the US. These are known as the “Pentagon Papers” and anyone can read them.The original and main reason for starting the Viet Nam war, was to prevent China from having influence in Asia. The US did not care about Viet Nam or the people there, they simply didn’t want China expanding it’s power, to do this the US wanted to subjugate 3 areas, Korea+Japan, India-Pakistan and Southeast Asia, in order to encircle China.


Later on in a memo during the LBJ reign, the main reason for staying in the war even after it became a political disaster, was that US military didn’t want to suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of untrained and ill equipped peasants, as it made the conventional US military look weak and incompetent. This resulted in major up-scaling of air bombing of Viet Nam and non-discriminatory death squads and other mass killings, to inflate both enemy combatant body count, and to destroy the country so thoroughly that it would not recover for decades, which could then be blamed on the communist north Vietnamese. The systematic destruction of the Vietnameese country side can be read about in the book “kill everything that moves”, copies can be found online. Warning, it’s not a fun read, and I don’t recommend it if you get easily emotional.

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