France also sucked the U.S. into a war we never wanted, in Vietnam.
Vietnam was a part of colonial French Indochina, up til WW II. Ho Chi Minh led a rebellion against the French rulers from the end of WW II up until victory over the French at Diembienphu in 1954.
With the French withdrawal, the U.N. split the country in 1954, into North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
At that point the plan was to make South Vietnam into a model of democracy, that would turn North Vietnam away from communism and Ho Chi Minh.
The French, predictably, under DeGaulle's leadership, was refusing to join NATO.
By the mid-50's, every other economy in Europe had recovered from WW II, except France, because of the cost of the war France was waging in Vietnam.
To gain France's cooperation in NATO, the U.S. began providing economic aid to South Vietnam.
The U.S. wanted to eliminate the corruption and inequality it saw in the South Vietnamese government, particularly its French-picked government leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was educated in French schools and was completely out of touch with the Vietnamese people.
Virtually all the foreign aid the U.S. provided went to the corrupt South Vietnamese elite, very little filtered down to assist the poor, when the poor protested, they were imprisoned and/or shot by the French-apointed Diem government.
Having no connection or authority to appeal to in the South Vietnamese government, the discontented and opressed people in South Vietnam began to turn to Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam for assistance and leadership. They became the South Vietnamese resistance, or the Vietminh (later called the Vietcong).
The U.S. started providing economic aid, but at French insistence, Diem could not be replaced.
Around 1960, the U.S. sent the first military advisors. to South Vietnam.
U.S. military presence increased gradually from that point. Diem was assassinated by South Vietnamese resistance in 1963.
Beyond that, the U.S. became too committed militarily, and whether out of real belief in resisting communism, or just the lack of a face-saving way to withdraw, we were sucked in all the way.
In some way I can't recall, France disappeared from the picture in 1963 (probably because the corrupt government under Diem it appointed had utterly failed).
U.S. involvement went full-scale in August 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (when a U.S. Naval ship was allegedly fired on in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin, but it was during a storm, there was no damage, and it may have been a manufactured incident, or a simply a poorly trained radar operator aboard the naval ship allegedly attacked, who may have misread the thrashing of the storm as incoming artillery).
Lyndon Johnson escalated the war.
Richard Nixon promised peace in the 1968 election, then expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia (bombing countries we weren't even legally at war with, to try and stop arms supplies from reaching South Vietnam through the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" where the North Vietnamese were smuglling supplies to the VietCong along the borders of Laos and Cambodia).
Richard Nixon finally, under protest pressure, began withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam in 1973. The last U.S. troops left when Saigan fell in 1975.
From 1964 forward, the U.S. is fully responsible for what happened. But it was France who dragged us there in the first place.
(I have this weird urge to make this comic book related and start talking about Jim Starlin's Vietnam allegory in "Metamorphosis Odyssey" in EPIC ILLUSTRATED 1-9, to somehow make this comic book related.
I think I've been posting on the DC Boards too much
)
