Sherluna Vien
10/8
ASA2 

Blog #5

In the reading From Saigon to Baghdad: The Vietnam Syndrome, Andrew Priest shows how the United States is good at twisting information to overstep their boundaries in international affairs. The United States has once prided itself for having one of the strongest military and its job to protect the world from communism. Particularly, its involvement in the Vietnam War was because of its “duty” to protect “democracy” in Southeast Asia. However, I believe we should be more skeptical of war and see who is trying to benefit from it. Specifically, Priest talks about how Presidents use analogies to promote and justify their policies and adds on about how Reagan was able to re-define the Vietnam War. From this, we can tell that presidents are able to use words to mix up our logic and emotions to support them for war. Bush, for example, used “War on Terror” as a scare tactic and gained support from the U.S Citizens . This shows you how easily we fall for words and how we should think twice about the United States involving itself in any international affairs. Overall, I believe Vietnam Syndrome was good for the United States, but we have slowly forgotten it and are once again overstepping our boundaries.

My question is: how do we know when we should go into war? Should we go into war for our safety without thinking about the other side? Why must we fight war in order to supposedly have peace?