Humanities

Humanities

2006

Humanities

The American experience in Vietnam was one of aggressive overt military intervention that began with President Harry Truman in 1950 and ended during President Nixon 's term in 1973 . The war was part of the United States ' effort to contain the spread of Communism supposedly from the Soviet Union . However , on the domestic front it gradually sparked a public outrage when American death toll kept on climbing with no victory in sight

The U .S . strike in Afghanistan was in retaliation of the September 11 2001

terrorist attacks in New York . The attack claimed the famed World Trade Center towers and thousands of innocent lives . The culprit was traced to Al-Queda , a terrorist organization headed by Osama Bin Laden who was believed to be in Afghanistan . Afghanistan was also known as a terrorist training ground . So far , Osama Bin Laden has not yet been captured The invasion of Iraq in March 20 , 2003 , was a preemptive strike mainly anchored on the anti-U .S . dictator Saddam Hussein 's supposed manufacture of weapons of mass destruction . Codenamed Operation Iraqi Freedom it also carries the objective of freeing the Iraqi people from the brutal regime of Hussein as well as ending Saddam Hussein 's dictatorship ( 2003 . The Bush administration and its allies like Great Britain had received a lot negative criticisms from the international community for the attack . Up to the present , no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq Afghanistan was in civil war when Soviet forces joined the fight in 1979 to assist Afghanistan 's Marxist People 's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA ) by virtue of a bilateral treaty Mujahideen insurgents . The treaty allowed the deployment of Soviet forces at Afghanistan 's request . The Soviet involvement lasted ten years

The sending of ground troops was initially in support of the new leader President Hafizullah Amin to preserve his then turbulent Kabul regime However , the Afghan guerillas were sufficiently backed by the U .S Pakistan , the Muslim Arab nations , thus the Soviet Union went into a conflict that they found difficult to win strategically and logistically

The casualties and economic losses took its toll on the Soviet public By mid-1987 Soviet Union announced a withdrawal of its forces . Between 1979 to 1989 , the casualties after the war for the Soviets mounted to thousands of troops not including the almost half a million troops who were either sick or wounded

One of the major lessons learned the war in Afghanistan by the Soviets was the Army 's inadequacy in its preparation and planning for the mission (Savranskaya , The Soviet Experience . The initial mission was only to guard cities and installations which later expanded to combat

Indeed , in the Soviet war against Afghanistan , it met its own Vietnam

On the Vietnam war , the Americans learned a hard lesson in the country 's terrain and the resolve of its people to fight to the finish With all the American combat resources , they did not expect the war to last long...