The United States first intervened in Indochina immediately after World War II in support of French recolonization, after which it carried out a twenty-one-year effort (1954–75) to impose a government in the southern half of Vietnam that U.S. officials and analysts consistently recognized as lacking any substantial indigenous support, and in opposition to local nationalist—though Communist—forces that were understood to have a mass base. U.S. leaders operated on the belief that their overwhelming military might would not only enable them, but entitled them, to force submission to a minority
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