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Question: How did Johnson continue and escalate the Vietnam war!?
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~You really need to look into how FDR allied with assisted Ho Chi Mihn and the Viet Minh in their war for independence against the Vichy French and Japan in 1940/40 - when we claimed to be neutral - then stabbed them in the back at Yalta and Tehran, and about how Harry Truman compounded the double-cross in 1945 and again in 1946 and about how Dwight Eisenhower completed the treachery in 1954 and 1956 to understand how and why we were there in the first place!. Having refused to allow the internationally supervised elections required by the Geneva Accords because in a fair election, Ho would have won in a landslide, there was nothing left to do but start killing people!.

We put Diem in power and kept him there, thus driving more and more enlistments into the Viet Minh, Viet Cong and NLF!. Finally Kennedy saw the light and was going to scale back and get out!. But first, he authorized CIA to assassinate Diem!. Twenty days after Diem was murdered, Kennedy went to Dallas!.

LBJ wanted to expand the US role in the war!. After all, the only good commie is one that's dead and he was gonna get out there and kill them reds!. To get the authority, he lied to Congress about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and about the role of the Maddox and the Turner Joy in it!. Believing the lies, and outraged Congress voted to give him a blank check on the war!. The Tonkin Resolution passed unanimously in the House and by 98 to 2 in the Senate!. Only Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska had the sense to oppose such a patently stupid and insane piece of legislation!. Even after LBJ was caught in his lies about the incident which precipitated the resolution, it was not repealed!. In fact, it wouldn't be repealed for eleven more years!.

It only looked like an escalation!? When LBJ took office, we had 16,000 advisers in country!. By 1965, we had 185,000 combat troops there and when he left office, we had half a million!. Underestimated the situation!? I hope he wasn't that stupid, but is seems George Bush is so I suppose LBJ, Robert McNamara and William Westmoreland have the right to be equally ignorant!. The never figured out that everything the US had done in the region since 1945 had only inflamed anti-Americanism and increased the popularity of Ho Chi Minh!. Ho was already the Vietnamese equivalent of George Washington long before FDR stated to send him aid!. The Vietnamese people knew we had put a corrupt, homicidal madman in power in the South and we were helping him and keeping him there!. Read about what Diem did to his own people to understand why Ho was such a vastly superior choice for the average Vietnamese peasant!. It's a no-brainer!. LBJ and Nixon never figured out that you can't kill and ideology or a desire to reunify your homeland by free and fair elections by killing people!. Duh!. Same issue Bush seems to be struggling with!. What would have happened if Ike hadn't gotten us involved!? Well, look at Vietnam today!. It is in far better shape than it was before the war!. Could it have been better!? Not under the likes of Diem and the despots CIA installed as their puppets after they killed him!.

Having the resolution in hand, everything LBJ did thereafter in Vietnam was constitutionally legal!. As for the millions killed by indiscriminate bombing, the millions killed by Agent Orange and other chemical weapons or the three million Vietnamese civilians who suffer from the effects today, including the babies born after the war with birth defects and genetic abnormalities, well he was never tried for war crimes or crimes against humanity!. Seems only our enemies ever do that kind of stuff!.

As to what he did exactly, troop levels, timelines of the war and related information is at your fingertips!. LBJ, like George W!. Bush, believed that success could be measured by body counts!. The idea was asinine in Nam!. Like most things so obvious from the history of the Middle East, Georgie failed to pick up on that basic lesson, too, when he planned his illegal and unjustified preemptive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan!. Maybe he didn't learn the lessons of history because he didn't do his own homework!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

I think you will find a lot of material here:
http://en!.wikipedia!.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

It may also be worth pointing out that Johnson was not the only one escalating the Vietnam war: the Soviets sent an enormous amount of war material (particularly trucks, to the point that they had to strip their civilian economy to find enough trucks for their armies to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968) and so many anti-aircraft missiles that they seem to have insufficient left to replenish Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur War!.

Johnson's basic approach seems to have been to underestimate what was needed and then send too little even for that!. He also hamstrung the forces he did send with unrealistic restrictions (e!.g!. visual sighting on air targets before engaging - which meant they would be too close to use radar-guided missiles; insisting that US officers attached to Vietnamese units could only advise, not lead in combat when combat leadership was precisely what the ARVN needed)!. As a result, he was constantly trying to catch up with the situation, and when people came to write history, this looked like 'escalation' whereas it was just a slow-thinking man doing too little, too late if he really wanted to stop communism in Vietnam!.

That is my understanding, anyway: feel free to decide whatever you think for your essay - and good luck!Www@QuestionHome@Com

gulf of tonkin incident, tonkin resolution, he dropped more bombs (operation rolling thunder) on vietnam than the entire amount of bombs dropped in wwii, he didn't know who he was fighting so success was measured in the amount of people killed and didn't matter whether they were communist, the tet offensive, my lai massacre etc!. Www@QuestionHome@Com