Who won the Vietnam War

The conflict in Vietnam far predates American involvement. For centuries, the Vietnamese have struggled to gain independence from outside invaders--the Chinese, the Mongols, the French and the Americans (Gibson, 1986, chapter 1). The Vietnamese carried an intense sense of nationalism that no occupation government had yet been able to subdue. In the early 1950's, the United Nations mediated the Geneva agreement in which Vietnam was partitioned into North and South Vietnam along the Seventeenth Parallel. It was planned that Vietnamese forces unfriendly to the West would remain within the north, while South Vietnam would be fashioned according to western economic and political principles--much like what the United Nations accomplished in Korea. Ho Chi Minh emerged as the leading opponent to the U.N. partition when he established the well-disciplined military organization called the Vietminh. The Vietminh established itself as the premier voice of Vietnamese nationalism (Pike, 1978, pp. 15-24).

The partition was never agreed to by North Vietnam or South Vietnam (Higgins, 1965, p. 10). Most of its sti

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veil the loss with the "peace" agreements of January 1973. The Paris agreements allowed for a U.S. withdrawal while continuing to aid the South Vietnamese government with military equipment and financial resources (Porter, 1975, p. 186). The United States also agreed to provide Hanoi $4.75 billion in aid for reconstruction--an offer that was later revoked after the collapse of Saigon. The bottom line is that the war cost the United States dearly. Roughly 58,000 American lives were lost. The partition collapsed and Vietnamese communists united the country. The United States managed to retreat its own forces, but the operation was chaotic. U.S. Marines had to swing rifle butts to keep desperate Vietnamese from blocking escape routes and angry South Vietnamese soldiers fired on departing Americans (Dawson, 1977). Almost as important as the loss in American lives were two other major costs to the United States: economic costs, and the loss in global prestige. The economic costs of the Vietnam war cannot be accurately calculated because there are both direct military expenditures and indirect social costs. Just to get an idea of the level of military expenditures, the United States dropped more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam ea
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