Do you think U.S. involvement in Vietnam was justified? Why or why not???

Answer 1

no, we did not have any business there just like we have no business to be in Iraq now, and in both instances we pay the price.

Answer 2

It all started with the decision of the US Senate to send aid to the failing effort of the French to hang onto their colonies. Joseph Kennedy was a close friend of Cardinal Francis Spellman. His son JFK was then in the Senate.

The cardinal told him the power of the Catholic Church was in danger in Vietnam. The people were obviously supporting Ho Chi Minh and the cardinal saw that Buddhism might take over. He asked Joseph Kennedy to get his son Jack to speak up in the Senate and Joe Kennedy agreed.

Thus America became involved. The Vietnamese had been striving for years to become independent of foreign control, having shucked off the Chinese, Japanese and French. Ho Chi Minh was their national hero, their George Washington. He was inspired by the US Declaration of Independence and kept a copy posted on his office wall.

When US military involvement began, an excuse was needed, so the fiction was invented that Vietnam was two states. The elections which would clearly be won by Ho Chi Minh were disallowed. A puppet regime was set up in Saigon with the pretense that it governed a state called "South Vietnam" although that country never existed in reality and the Saigon regime never controlled the territory it pretended to rule over.

The Vietnamese wanted to win their independence and they eventually succeeded. It is regrettable that they looked to the USSR as an ally, but it is understandable since they feared China too much to ask for China's help, and the rest of the world abandoned them. By identifying with the Communist world they alienated the administrations of Eisenhower and the succeeding ones. The Cold War was still on. But perhaps they had no other choice.

By the time it was over, 56,000 American lives and about three million Asian lives were lost. This tragedy was a lose-lose proposition for everybody involved.

Among its victims were the US veterans who made it home safely. Many suffered mental illnesses and many still do. They got no parades or thanks, and many are today's homeless. Our vets did a thankless job and have been treated badly ever since. In Vietnam, too, their own returning veterans arriving home in Hanoi were despised and verbally abused. Nobody won that war. It would have been understandable if America's returning vets had strung up the people responsible from lampposts along Pennsylvania Avenue for sending them there.

Answer 3

My dad is a Vietnam Vet. I see both sides of the story and take an overlook of the times and who was running the government. Then you have to think about war in general. Sometimes,when situations start,they start for the right reasons and then become blurred. My dad, is a great man, I respect him for going and doing what he had to do, he was drafted. 18 years old and came back crippled for the rest of his life. My uncle just came back Iraq. I try to reason rather or not Vietnam is justifiable but I wasn't there back then and there is two sides to every story.

Answer 4

It was not. For one thing, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing US involvement was passed by Congress based on incorrect intelligence information. Where have we heard that one before?

Second, one of the justifications was that "Communism was a monolithic bloc and any spread was an instance of the USSR spreading its control. To e sure, the Kremlin was partly responsible for this--they had spent years aspiring to just such a role. But it was not true--Whatever else they were, most (except the Warsaw Pact) the communist states--and especially Vietnam--were as independantly nationalistic as any other countries. And the "domino theory" that was based on this view--the theory that any "yielding" would lead to further increases in communism's power--was false-as subsequent history proved. There were no "dire consequences" as conservatives predicted when Saigon fell. (Again, does this line of rhetoric of "getting out means some undefined disaster" sound familier?).

Finally, the rhetoric claimed that the Saigon government was a democracy and the US was aiding it in its efforts to preent its overthrow by a would-be dictatorship inspired and fomented by outside ers. (More deja vu). In fact, despite the claims of conservatives to the contrary, this was a civil war--between a client government and its supporters, put into power by the French and propped up by the United States--seeking to crush a grass-roots popular insurgencythat sought a fully indigenous government independant f outside influences. (Yep, seems that's another parallel!).

In short, we should have kept our noses out of Vietnam. And we were warned. The North Vietnamese military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, described publicly--in the late 1950s-exactly how he would defeat the United States if we got involved.. We did and he did.

Answer 5

Absolutely not. Read this article from the prominent scholar Noam Chomsky.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19750612.htm

Answer 6

Nope. its all thanks to three letters.

LBJ