What was the primary reason for the Vietnam war?

Answer 1

there was war against the french for 100 years of pillage and plunder. it wasn't enough for the french to just leave but they had to divide the country too. and the world agree.
what bull.
and the U.S. could have prevented this. Ho Chi Minh and his vet minh implore the US to support their cause against the Japanese and french. the us refused so minh turn to the next best thing. the soviet union and china

Answer 2

There is certainly no one reason...but a real factor was that once we went in, because of stupid human pride, there was no coming out until we lost or won.

What people failed to realize is that Vietnam had been controlled and fought over for CENTURIES and weren't going to roll over now. We weren't anything more than another invader to them, and their primitive tactics worked extremely well against our forces.

So, us first not understanding the Vetamese, then underestimating them, is a reason it went on for so long, I hope this helps.

Answer 3

An honest answer.....
American stupidity

From the Vietnamese side it was NEVER about a war to spread communism. It was a nationalist war to get their country back from decades of foriegn rule by the French, the Japanese and then the French again and finally the interfering Americans.
Ho Chi Ming liked America!!!! He owed his life to American Doctors during WWII.... He appealed to President Eisenhower to not help the French restore colonial rule. It was only after Ike turned him down and actively sent aid tothe French that Ho went to the USSR in search of help and bowed to their request that he embtrace communism. After that each successive administration-Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon- had to continue a stupid policy in order to "oppose communism".

Answer 4

It was started by Northern aggression against the Southern part following the overthrow of the French. The US got involved because of the Truman doctrine and the American ideas of containment and the domino effect.

Answer 5

It depends which side you are asking about because there were several sides: the Vietnamese, and later North and South Vietnam, the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and some allies.

From the Vietnamese side, it is probably viewed as a war primarily to win freedom from colonial powers, followed by a war to unite the country.

The roots go all the way back to the peace conference that ended WW I in 1919. Ho Chi Minh actually led a small delegation of Vietnamese patriots who attempted to get France to give up their colonies in SE Asia. The French rejected this, and so the Vietnamese returned to Vietnam and started to fight them.

When the Japanese invaded in WW II, the Vietnamese at first welcomed them for expelling the French. It soon became apparent that the Japanese were also repressive colonizers and so the Vietnamese started to fight them.

With the end of WW II, the country was divided into two zones of administration (as was Korea), the North under the Soviets and the South under the Americans. Vietnam had hoped for freedom (and initially were encouraged in this by the Americans), but instead found themselves once again colonized by the French. So they started to fight again. In 1954, they won and the French agreed to withdraw.

The peace deal redivided the country into North and South, and allowed for national elections to be held in 1956. However, as time passed it became clear that Ho Chi Minh, a communist, would win. So, the South, again with American encouragement, refused to hold the elections, and instead set up its own government.

Gradually, fighting between the two governments escalated as the North sought reunification, and the South sought independence. Gradually American involvement deepened, first with advisers and aid, but eventually with a huge full blown army.

Thus from the Vietnamese side, the war was actually a series of wars: for freedom from the French, then Japanese, and then French again. And then more fighting: the North might have said to unite the North and South, against the government of South Vietnam and the US and its allies (including Australia and South Korea, for example), but the South might have said to remain free from communism.

From the French point of view, the Vietnam war was primarily a fight to retain their colony before WW II and then a fight to reclaim it again after WW II.

From the Japanese point of view, the Vietnam war was primarily a fight to expand their empire, and to gain access to resources in SE Asia (like rubber) that would be useful to their war effort during WW II.

From the American point of view, the primary reason that the government would have given was to oppose communist aggression of the North against the South. Of course, this ignores that the US had actively opposed the elections that were called for in 1956. Nonetheless, the primary motivating factor in US foreign policy from about 1947 to 1989 was containing communism, and this also underlay the opposition to the Vietnamese election = Ho Chi Minh was a communist who was backed by the Soviets and so he needed to be opposed.

Of course, as the war went on, the reasons for the US remaining involved changed. With the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the US claimed that its navy had been directly attacked, and so that was used to justify giving President Johnson the authority to increase US involvement.

Later, Johnson realized the war was not winnable from the US side, but was hamstrung by the reality of both losing a war and with allowing the communists to win. Thus, US domestic politics played a role in continuing the war. As the war looked less and less winnable, but with Johnson refusing to concede, a large number of people in the US and elsewhere started to feel that the primary reason for the war was actually an attempt at colonialism (simply taking over Vietnam without regard for the Vietnamese) by the US itself.

President Nixon, in his second term, was able to arrange a peace deal, though only after significantly expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia. President Ford was the one who had to chose between either re-entering the war, as the South fell, or letting the North win. He stood the US aside and Vietnam was finally unified under its own government in 1975 - about 45, or even 50, years after the fighting started.

BTW: Did you know that Ho Chi Minh is an adopted name meaning 'Ho the patriot'. Also, the 1954 constitution of North Vietnam was modeled on the US constitution by Ho Chi Minh.

Also BTW: as I wrote this, I surprised myself by seeing several parallels with the US involvement in Iraq. Do you?

Answer 6

To stop the proliferation of communism in Southeast Asia.

Chow!!