Hist 122

Sydney Couturier HIST 122 11-11:50 Saturday March 17th Extra Credit The United States thought that bombing was the solution to everything, but really it didn’t solve anything it just made everything worse. The United States chose this bombing strategy which held us deeper in war. Why we were involved in the Vietnam war was because of the Gulf of Tokin Incident in 1964. President Johnson didn’t want to send the Americans on the ground, so he thought that he could bomb the enemy to force them to the negotiation table, but this didn’t work. George W. Ball that bombing alone doesn’t win wars, it angers them. He advised president Johnson to pull out of the war before it was too late, but Johnson didn’t listen. The strategy of bombing proved that indiscriminate bombing didn’t help. When the bombers rolled in they killed civilians, that wasn’t the intention, but it happened. This angered them to continue fighting against the United States. Why they continued to use this tactic even though it was failing, was because of domestic politics and foreign policy. All in all, bombing failed to bring the communist closer to the negotiation table. The United States did not heed of history and bombing has never worked and it never will. I think that it is interesting the President Johnson thought that bombing the communist was going to help bring them to us to negotiate with us. I wouldn’t think that this would work, because we would be destroying their property and killing innocent people. I thought it was interesting that there were Australians on our side helping us fight this war and that they only had about 20,000 soldiers that helped fight. If any of them died then the Australian prime minister didn’t want to send out any more troops, because they only settled for that many troops to be sent to help out. I thought that this First section of the conference was really good. I learned a lot just by sitting in on one section and if there are people who are interested in history I really suggest them going to this and checking it out.