IFJ-INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF JOURNALIST:WORLD TURKISH NEWS/ World Turkish News Ertuğrul Demiröszcan After the United States entered the Vietnam War, the human losses and economic losses It left many psychologically damaged people and many broken families in society If the United States entered the war on the side of Israel, it would deal a huge blow to the American economy and many young Americans would die and be disabled The costs of the Vietnam War The costs of the Vietnam War The famous photo of nine-year-old Kim Phuc escaping a napalm attack. The human and economic costs of the Vietnam War were devastating. In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh stood in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square and declared the birth of an independent Vietnam. It would take another 30 years and several million lives for this dream to become a reality. The Vietnam conflict was one of the greatest human tragedies of the 20th century. Estimates of the number of people killed in Indochina range from two and a half million to more than four million. Even more were maimed, disabled, orphaned, displaced, or forced to flee as refugees. The Vietnam War was fought for civilians, by civilians, and among civilians, and most of the casualties were civilians. American aircraft dropped seven million tons of munitions—three times the amount dropped in World War II—plus napalm and chemical defoliants. This not only took lives, it devastated cities, buildings, infrastructure, farmland, and vegetation. Neither the bombing nor the ground war was confined to Vietnam. Neighboring countries Laos and Cambodia both suffered enormous human and material losses, and terrorist and genocidal regimes were on the rise. The United States lost approximately 60,000 personnel and civilians in Vietnam: 58,269 service members were killed and 1,672 were reported missing. America was deeply affected by these heavy losses and struggled to understand the meaning, significance, and lessons of the Vietnam War. Many Americans chose not to mention the Vietnam conflict, which diplomat George Kennan described as “the most disastrous enterprise” in 200 years of U.S. history. Yet there was an inevitable wave of justifications, criticisms, and reprisals. Some declared Vietnam a nationalist conflict in which Washington should not have intervened. Its attempts at state-building were completely unsuccessful, its postwar support for the French colonial regime and its failure to lead South Vietnam under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem, until its support for Nguyen Van Thieu and the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). Some argued that America’s violence against civilians in Vietnam—from random killings to brutality, My Lai, and indiscriminate carpet bombing—did not make the United States any better than the communist regimes it sought to control. Critics on the political right argued that the war was winnable but was lost by politicians who restricted the terms of engagement, refused to authorize more firepower (including the use of tactical nuclear weapons), and left the military short of men and supplies. They argued that the defeat in Vietnam was a betrayal of the U.S. military by civilian politicians. “The debates about the war were heated and visceral, and led Americans to question each other’s morality and good faith. The government’s deception led the nation to distrust its leaders, and Americans with different views on the war became distrustful and hostile. Jack Smith, a psychologist who served as a Marine in Vietnam, said that everyone blamed each other for what went wrong: ‘The soldiers blame the politicians, the right blame the pinks, the media, and the protesters, the left blame the right.’” Patrick Hagopian, historian These debates led to a reexamination of American leadership in the Cold War. Vietnam was the first significant military defeat in U.S. history and would shape American foreign policy for several years. The domino theory was weakened, even destroyed, even before the war ended when Richard Nixon publicly announced the end of the Truman Doctrine. The Vietnam War and Watergate shattered public confidence in the United States government; it would take years to recover. Global confidence in America as the 'arsenal of democracy' was also damaged. Washington withdrew significantly from foreign conflicts and crises, becoming less interventionist and assertive. It also entered a period of détente ('dealing') with Cold War rivals the Soviet Union and communist China. The practical impact of the Vietnam War on the domestic front of the United States was also profound. Two decades of military intervention and financial support for friendly regimes cost the United States an estimated 170 billion US dollars (about 1 tr in today's terms).