The ink on the agreement that ended World War II barely had time to dry before another war began, this time in a remote corner of the Earth that most Americans barely knew anything about -- the peninsula in Southeast Asia called Indo- China. But by the time the fighting ended thirty years later, there was hardly an American without a very strong opinion one way or another on the Vietnam War, which cost nearly 50,000 American lives and created deep divides in this country that have yet to heal. In fact, the debate over American involvement in Iraq is nearly a mirror image of the arguments over Vietnam that raged in the 1960s. Those who opposed the Vietnam War did so on the grounds that it was a fight that America couldn't win. Besides, the US had no business meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation on the other side of the globe, they said. Sound familiar?

Even a cursory look at Vietnam's history would seem to indicate that the US's attempt to impose its will on the Vietnamese was doomed from the start. Here were a people whose battle for independence began more than 2,000 years ago when the Chinese first invaded the peninsula. By World War II, with both the French and the Japanese occupying Indo-China, the nationalist fervor exploded into war when the Viet Minh formed to fight for independence under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the son of a government official, who for a brief period had worked as a cook in America. Few gave Ho's underfed army a chance against one of the so-called Great Powers. But over the next eight years, Ho consistently out-fought and out-manuevered his supposedly superior rivals. Ironically, because the Viet Minh fought against the Japanese during World War II, for a time they received aid from the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. That also mirrored later developments in Afghanistan where in the 1980s the CIA actively supported its future enemy, the Taliban, when the Islamist group was fighting Russia.

The war between France and the Viet Minh lasted eight years until a truce was declared shortly after the French forces suffered an ignominious defeat at Dienbienphu. By then, American involvement in the war on the side of the French was an open secret, even though American soldiers were already fighting and dying in the frozen mountains of Korea. After the Eisenhower Administration linked the two nations, calling them both victims of Communist aggression, it was clear that soon, Americans would be fighting and dying in the tropical heat of Vietnam. How did it get to that point? How did America become involved in a war that it was destined to lose? Let's turn back the pages of The Nation to 1947, when the roots of America's first military defeat took root in the soil of Vietnam.