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History of Americas II
Was U.S. military intervention in Vietnam justified?
Article II
Viewpoint: No, U.S. military intervention in Vietnam did not serve U.S. interests, and it violated the
precepts of the Western concept of a "just" war.
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War changed the American public's perspective on the cold war and on
how much the United States should be willing to pay in money and blood to attain foreign-policy goals. It
also diminished public trust in the government.
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were part of the French Empire, grouped together under the name
Indochina. The region was occupied by Japan during the Second World War. After Japan's defeat,
Vietnamese nationalists (the Vietminh), who had fought against the Japanese occupiers, demanded
independence from France. France objected, and a ten year war ensued. In 1950, France recognized a proFrench Vietnamese government, led by Bao Dai and located in Saigon in the south. Ho Chi Minh, leader
of the Vietminh, claimed that he was the legitimate representative of Vietnamese nationalists and
countered by declaring the independence of the northern section of Vietnam, as the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam (North Vietnam) with Hanoi as its capital city. He continued the war against French colonial
forces, inflicting the final defeat on the French army on 7 May 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, located in
northwest Vietnam near the border with Laos, eighty miles from the Chinese border. The battle cost five
thousand French casualties, and about twice that number were taken prisoner. France appealed to the
United States for military help but was turned down.
At peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland, it was decided that Vietnam would be divided along the
seventeenth parallel for two years, after which a nationwide democratic election would determine who
should rule the united Vietnam. The United States refused to accept the agreement (but agreed not to
prevent its implementation). Bao Dai also refused to abide by the agreement, as did Ngo Dinh Diem, who
succeeded Bao Dai as head of state in 1955. On 26 October 1956 Diem declared the independence of the
Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The United States and its Western allies quickly recognized the
South Vietnamese regime.
In 1957 North Vietnam began a covert military campaign to destabilize the South Vietnamese regime.
The Vietcong, manned by procommunist cadres in the South, was created, trained, and supplied by the
North. By 1961 its strength was estimated at one hundred thousand. South Vietnam was already sinking
into turmoil, as the Buddhist-majority population became increasingly disenchanted with the oppressive
Diem regime, which relied largely on the nation's Catholic minority. By early 1963 the U.S. ambassador
to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, advised the State Department that the United States should begin
to search for an alternative to Diem. On 1 November 1963 South Vietnamese military officers overthrew
Diem, and he and his brother were shot to death.
American support for the South Vietnamese regime began in 1955 and escalated as the Vietcong's attacks
on the Saigon regime increased. Between January 1961 and June 1962, the number of U.S. military
advisers in Saigon increased from 700 to 12,000. By the time of President John F. Kennedy's
assassination in 1963, that number had reached 16,200. On 2 August 1964 North Vietnamese torpedo
boats reportedly attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered
the destroyer C. Turner Joy to join the Maddox, and on 4 August both destroyers reportedly came under
attack. In response the administration sent Congress a resolution, which came to be called the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to use American forces in Southeast Asia to defend
American allies against communist attack. The House approved this resolution unanimously, and the
Senate concurred with only two dissenting votes. President Johnson was thus given the authority to
increase the number of troops in Vietnam and use them in battle without asking Congress for a
declaration of war.
On 7 February 1965 the Vietcong attacked a U.S. base near Pleiku, killing seven Americans and
wounding more than one hundred. In retaliation Johnson ordered Operation Flaming Dart, in which a
North Vietnamese military base, located sixty miles north of the border separating North from South
Vietnam, was bombed. On 10 February the Vietcong attacked a hotel at Qui Nhon, eighty miles east of
Pleiku, killing twenty-three members of the 140th Maintenance Detachment of a U.S. Army aircraftrepair unit. On 13 February, Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, an increasingly massive
bombing campaign against targets inside North Vietnam, which continued with only a few breaks until
1968, when Johnson, as part of his peace initiative, announced a bombing moratorium.
In March 1965 two U.S. Marine battalions were sent to defend the Da Nang airfield. These Marines were
the first American combat troops in Vietnam. In summer 1965 General William C. Westmoreland,
commander of the American forces in Vietnam, asked for forty-four additional battalions and by
December 1965 the number of U.S. troops in the country had reached 200,000. In 1966 that number
reached 400,000, and by the end of 1967 more than 500,000. By the end of 1968 the number of American
soldiers in Vietnam had peaked at 540,000. Under President Richard M. Nixon's "Vietnamization" plan,
which shifted more of the burdens of the fighting to the South Vietnamese military, American forces were
drawn down to 280,000 at the end of 1970 and 140,000 at the end of 1971.
The Vietnamization plan was part of President Nixon's dual-track policy of "peace with honor." The aims
of this strategy were to reduce and then end the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and reach an
accommodation between North and South Vietnam. Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger,
met in secret with a North Vietnamese negotiator in August 1969, and in February 1970 he began talks
with Le Duc Tho, the chief North Vietnamese peace representative. While the secret talks were going on
in Paris and the reduction of U.S. forces continued, the United States also expanded the war to neighbors
of Vietnam. In 1969 the United States began bombing Vietcong hideouts in Cambodia, and, in April
1970, Nixon ordered an invasion of Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.
In October 1972 Kissinger announced that the talks with the North Vietnamese were progressing and that
he believed "peace [was] at hand." Last minute snags in the talks led Nixon to order the Christmas
bombing of 1972, and after eleven days of massive bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong, North Vietnam
returned to the negotiations table. The peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam
was signed on 17 January 1973, over the objections of South Vietnam. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam
on 29 March 1973. In January 1975 the North Vietnamese resumed their offensive against the South. On
17 April, Saigon fell to the communists and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City; Vietnam was united.
More than 56,000 Americans died in the war, and 300,000 were wounded; 1,300 soldiers were reported
missing in action (MIA); 400,000 South Vietnamese and 900,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed.
It is estimated that 750,000 Cambodian civilians and 150,000 Laotian civilians also died.
The legacy of the Vietnam War may be measured by two concepts it bequeathed the political discourse in
the United States. The first is credibility gap, coined to express the American public's increasing doubts
regarding President Johnson's announcements about the progress of the war. Indeed, scholars point to the
U.S. involvement (and the manner in which it was handled domestically) as one of the two major events
that led to a secular diminution in the American in the American public's support for and belief in its
government institutions and the spread of cynicism and apathy among the citizenry. (The other event was
Watergate.)
The second term born out of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the Vietnam syndrome--the profound
reluctance of Americans to support U.S. involvement in foreign wars if the number of U.S. causalities
entailed rises above an unrealistically low (and, hence, in most cases, operationally paralyzing) var. The
heavy emphasis in post-Vietnam U.S. military tactics on high-tech weapons and precision-guided
munitions is a result of the Vietnam War. Reliance on such weapons diminished the risk to American
lives, but whether or not this reliance on high-tech gadgetry is always the most effective approach
militarily is a different question.
View Point II: No, U.S. military intervention in Vietnam did not serve U.S. interests, and it violated the
precepts of the Western concept of a "just" war.
In deciding whether to use armed force, policymakers invariably take into account national interest and
moral issues, as they see them. The extensive documentation now available on the decision-making
process during the Vietnam War demonstrates that both these issues informed internal U.S. governmental
debate on the war, though moral considerations were often more implicit than explicit. With a few
exceptions, the highest-level American policymakers convinced themselves that the ongoing war in
Vietnam was crucial to American national security and morally justified in terms of the benefits to the
South Vietnamese.
The national-security argument was based on the "domino theory," which held that, even though South
Vietnam had little intrinsic strategic or economic significance, its fall to communism would eventually
pose the gravest threat to U.S. national security. Throughout the war it was nearly axiomatic among U.S.
policymakers that a communist victory in South Vietnam would inexorably be followed by the
progressive and irreversible fall of neighboring countries, the rest of Southeast Asia, Japan, all of the
Pacific, and then (in some versions) the Third World, Latin America, and even western Europe. Vicepresident Lyndon B. Johnson's 1961 report to President John F. Kennedy asserted this accepted wisdom:
"The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia. . . or the United States, inevitably,
must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores. . . . We must decide whether to
help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses
to San Francisco and a Fortress American concept."
Apart from the national-security issue, policymakers also believed that the Vietnam War was (in Ronald
Reagan's words) "a noble cause." They had two reasons for this conviction. First, Vietnam had been to
resist international aggression, defend freedom, develop democracy, or preserve the principle of selfdetermination, the Vietnam War would arguably have met the just-cause criterion-indeed, the war might
even have been "a noble cause." The true purposes of the U.S. intervention, however, were revealed in the
behavior of the United States, not its rhetoric.
The only state guilty of international aggression in the Vietnam War was the United States, and the
American intervention had neither the intention nor the consequence of upholding freedom, democracy,
or self-determination. As was the case in so many Third World states during the cold war, the real purpose of the extensive U.S. intervention in Vietnam from 1954 through 1973 was to keep in power
anticommunist military dictatorships, threatened not by international aggression but at first by democracy
itself and later-after the United States joined the South Vietnamese government in blocking any chance at
peaceful, democratic change-by indigenous revolution.
When the discrepancy between proclaimed purposes and actual behavior became widely noted, the U.S.
government shifted its emphasis from the freedom-and-democracy claim to that of the principle of selfdetermination: the South Vietnamese, it was said, must be allowed to determine their own political
system, free from the coercion of communist revolution or "external" (North Vietnamese) intervention.
The communists, however, had turned to violence and revolution only after the government of Ngo Dinh
Diem, with U.S. collaboration, had aborted the political process set up by the Geneva Accords of 1954,
precisely because of the fear that if the Vietnamese were allowed freely to choose their political future,
they would choose Ho as their national leader.
Thereafter, the United States made it clear that the goal of self-determination was acceptable only so long
as the process would not lead to neutralism or nonalignment, let alone to communism. Elections were
rigged; coups were arranged against South Vietnamese governments that indicated a willingness to negotiate with the North, such as the Diem government, in 1963; and only the Americans supported the
hardest-line military governments.
As this history suggests, true American support of the principle of self-determination could have
provided the United States with the long-sought "honorable exit" from the war. Rather than seize such
opportunities, Washington repeatedly squelched them. In 1965, for example, the U.S. ambassador to
South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, was asked by a congressional committee what American policy
would be if a South Vietnamese government asked for a U.S. withdrawal. His answer was: the United
States would not depart from South Vietnam if the request came from "a left wing or even neutralist
government that, in the U.S. view, did not reflect the true feelings of the South Vietnamese people or
military leaders."
In short, far from serving the purposes of nonaggression, freedom, democracy, or se1fdetermination in
Vietnam, the United States made a mockery of these principles. As in so many other places during the
cold war, whenever ideological anticommunism clashed with morality, there was no contest.
The principle of proportionality requires that the good that may reasonably be expected to emerge from
war must outweigh the evils of war itself. An alternative formulation of the same principle holds that a
war must have a reasonable chance of success at a cost commensurate with the true stakes of that war.
Perhaps a case can be made that, in the initial stage of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (1954-1964), it was
at least plausible (though certainly questionable) to believe that the stakes were high in terms of the global
policy of containing communist expansion and that American political, economic, and military assistance
to South Vietnam would be sufficient to prevent a communist victory. Even as evidence accumulated that
the stakes had been exaggerated, however-because of the Sino Soviet split, the limited nature of Soviet or
Chinese support for North Vietnam, and the growing evidence that the domino theory was implausiblethe American role in Vietnam expanded; the probability of success declined; and the economic, political,
and, above all, human costs mounted.
It would be hard to find a more disastrous failure of proportionality. Indeed, it is difficult even to
construct a coherent account of the thinking of American policymakers. Did they truly believe in the
apocalyptic predictions of the domino theory? If so, then why was overwhelming force in Vietnam not
applied? Devastating as the war was, obviously far more could have been done: unlimited bombing of
North Vietnam, a million (or nearly unlimited) rather than 500,000 American troops in South Vietnam,
perhaps an invasion of North Vietnam, and even, if necessary, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. All
these measures involved high costs and serious risks, of course, but if the future of the West and direct
U.S. national security had been truly at stake, surely those costs and risks had to be accepted.
The unwillingness to escalate the American military commitment to Vietnam to the level that finally
might bring victory suggests that policymakers harbored doubts about whether the stakes were really
global. In that case, however, why were they willing to bear the already enormous costs of the war, as
well as risk Chinese or Soviet intervention? If policymakers believed the domino theory, they should have
done far more; if they did not believe it, they should have done far less. Indeed, if all that was at stake was
the political complexion of the strategically and economically insignificant countries of Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia, they should have done nothing at all.
The core principle of jus in bello is that war must never be made on innocent civilians or noncombatants.
Perhaps the worst feature of the Vietnam War was that its conduct amounted to a massive-indeed,
properly considered, a criminal-violation of this principle. The "strategy" of the American war effort was
one of attrition: General William C. Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, stated,
"We'll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the
point of national disaster for generations." Because of the use of massive, inherently indiscriminate
firepower, together with the fact that the enemy successfully blended into the general populace, those who
"bled" inevitably included more than a million North and South Vietnamese civilians.
In addition to the massive use of firepower, it was also the deliberate policy of the American government
to destroy villages and farmland in South Vietnam, so as to drive people off the land and deprive the
communists a population base from which to conduct the war. Moreover, throughout the war there were
extensive individual or small-unit atrocities carried out by American soldiers, whose actions, while not
"policy," were nonetheless widespread, largely unchecked, and unpunished.
As the war escalated, Vietnam itself became increasingly unimportant. Rather, it became a battlefield in
the global ideological crusade against "international communism," a country that-regrettably-had to be
destroyed in order to be saved.
Not only was the Vietnam War a military and political disaster, but also it was also an intellectual
disgrace (based as it was on the vacuous premises of the domino theory) and a moral catastrophe. It was
unjust in its ends, for the preservation of a dictatorial and repressive anticommunist regime in South
Vietnam was insufficiently compelling in either moral or national-interest terms to justify the massive
intervention in an internal revolution. It was even more unjust in the means by which it was fought.
Indeed, America's conduct in the Vietnam War violated every criterion of the just war philosophy, the
centuries-old consensus of Western religious, philosophical, and moral thought on war.
-JEROME SLATER, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO
References
Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institutions, 1979).
Mike Gravel, ed., The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 5 volumes (Boston: Beacon, 1972).
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).
George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1979).
George McTurnin Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf,
1986).
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, revised and updated edition (New York: Penguin, 1997).
Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random
House, 1988).
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York:
Basic Books, 1977).