Was the Vietnam War right or wrong?

Question

Was the US right or wrong to get involved in this war?

Answer 1

Difficult to say... but the ending of the war was shameful

Answer 2

The answer to your question is... Was any war right or wrong. While unfortunate that there needs to be a war to begin with, sometimes they are necessary. Leaders make decisions based on the facts and threats that face them at the time they make decisions. No one is qualified to make Monday morning quarter back decisions based on the results of a war. Ask yourself this question, Where would we be today if we chose not to go to war instead we just looked the other way. You can pick any war you like but try these, The Civil War, WW I, WW II, Korea, Viet Nam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq. Answer each of these and you will have answers except for the last 2 that are not yet completed. I will give you my answer now, we were right to get involved in each and every one of them If we did not fight the Civil war we would not have had the oppurtunity to have made the decisions on whether to fight the others.

Answer 3

Wrong, 58,000 young men killed, and a hate streak born in the hearts of many Americans who cannot come to terms with the facts that support the reasoning which opposes foreign involvement in war for personal gain, which is the final evaluation why Vietnam was wrong.. Personal gain is the ghost that fermented what is commonly known as The Vietnam War.

Answer 4

Given the context of the time it was right for the United States to have supported the Republic of South Vietnam. But it was wrong to have committed massive US ground combat troops. The US IMHO should have given Vietnam military and economic aid and avoided direct US intervention. The sending of US ground troops took the will to fight out of the ROV troops and galvanized anti-imperialist, patriotic and communist Vietnamese resistance much as the French had a decade before.
World Communism was the greatest threat Democracy ever faced. Fascism, Nazism and Japanese imperialism despite their combined military power never made the same kind of social economic, ideological and military inroads in nearly every country on earth. To have done nothing the US would have surrendered the initiative to the Communist block.
Did the US intervention achieve anything? Yes. North Vietnamese was exhausted by the war and prevented it from spreading into Thailand.

Answer 5

The Vietnam was just was. It was our attempt to contain Communism.

The way the war was fought was wrong. That is, politicians have no place telling a trained military HOW to fight. Politicians are to set large objectives and overall constraints in conjunction with the military, and let the military do what it knows how to do: make war. I also personally do not believe free speech applies to the media in wars not even on American soil...we should NOT be able to hear Walter Cronkite or Joe Snuffy report about the war, without approval by the Defense Department.

Answer 6

1. The Vietnam War was RIGHT!!!!
2. The USA was absolutely right to get involved in
Vietnam!!

Answer 7

Hitler was taking land little by little slowly gaining power. America was trying to prevent the soviets form doing this all over again. On top of that the world had come closer than it ever had to the extinction of man kind during the Cuban missile crises just a few years earlier.

I think we were right in going to war based on past experiences. But it eventually got to a point where we were better off pulling out. We gave the soviets there own Vietnam in Afghanistan any way.

Answer 8

Personally, I'm from Souther Vietnam. My family left after 1973 and was brought up in America. But to my mind, Vietnam War was wrong. Wrong because you make it's looked like the USA was trying to invade Vietnam, lead to the fact that quite a lot of Vietnameses thought of you as conqueror, not liberator. Did USA bring democracy and freedom to Vietnam? Yes, but they brought more death and destruction to my country than democracy, freedom or wealth. Millions tons of bomb was dropped down on my country, over 7 million people died in nearly 20 years of war. Who killed them? Who killed my people? The North Vietnamese? Yes, over hundreds thousand people die because of Communism in the North, but the USA killed ten times of that number I supposed. Not just dropping bomb, you American destroyed a whole Vietnamese generations thanks to your genius weed killer "Orange Agents". If you said you had to prevent Communism, why the heck didn't you just go to war with Soviet Union or China or North Korea? They were even more evil than the North Vietnamese. What is so right about Vietnam War? I hate Communism deep into my bone because they are making my country to go down, but does the USA really better than them?

Answer 9

Preventing the spread of communism, especially during the Cold War with Russia trying to gain a strong foothold in the world was a worthwhile cause. The execution of the war was less than ideal, but I don't disagree with the reasons behind getting involved in it.

Answer 10

It depends on how you look at it, of course. But if we look at the reasons our govt. gave us for fighting it, the justifications they used, it was wrong. We were told that if Vietnam went communist, the rest of southeast Asia would fall like dominoes. Laos, Cambodia, then Burma and Thailand would all go communist. Well we did lose, Vietnam did come under a communist government, and the 'domino effect' didn't happen.

And ironically, a sort of reverse domino effect was used to justify the current war in Iraq. After all the other justifications failed--Saddam was behind 9/11, Saddam helped Al Quaida, Saddam was 6 months away from having a nuclear weapon, Saddam had WMD and could attack us in 40 minute with unmanned airplanes, etc.etc.--after none of those worked, Bush turned it around. It wasn't about -us-, it was about -them-! We would establish an exemplary democracy in Iraq which would spread democracy throughout the Middle East. A sort of reverse domino theory. That didn't work either!

Answer 11

Wrong. We felt we had to get involved because of the Domino Theory, even thought there was an obvious crack in the Communist Monolith between Russia and China, and Vietnam was a puppet of neither. Vietnam was fighting to get rid of foreign domination, not primarily for the sake of Communism. By getting involved, we delayed them learning for themselves that Communism doesn't work, not to mention cost us 58,000 lives and them over 5 million. They were willing to fight to the last man, and we had enough at 58,000. So if we were to bail out eventually, we should have done it a lot sooner and saved a lot of lives that were wasted on a war based on faulty perceptions.