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UNIT 4 COLD WAR 1945-1963Vietnam War – Evidence from ArticlesWas American military involvement in Vietnam justifiable?Article: Opinions After the WarJustified Not JustifiedSome of the Vietnamese who had fought on the side of the Saigon regime (Saigon was now renamed Ho Chi Minh City) and had fled to the United States saw themselves as having fought for freedom because they had fought against communism, and they described their loss of the war as a result of having been abandoned by the United States.But there were also those in the US who continued to see the war as simply the North having invaded the South - as simply Communist expansion.A few described help from the Soviet Union and China as having made the Communist victory possible - without comparing the level of that support to the support that the United States gave to Saigon for more than a decade.Many who had fought on the side of the Viet Cong or the Viet Minh continued to see it as having given their nation freedom from foreign domination.He (PM Nguyen Kao Ky) saw the roll of hearts and minds in Saigon's defeat. In his book, How We Lost the War in Vietnam, he described the US role in Vietnam as “misguided” and na?ve concerning the opinions of the common Vietnamese.There were those in the United States who continued to believe that the US should not have withdrawn from the war. And there were those who believed that the US made mistakes regarding Vietnam early in the Cold War. They believed that US support for the French there was a mistake and that the US getting involved with its won troops and more of its treasure were added mistakes, and that no amount of additional blood and treasure would have erased those mistakes.Article: Debate – The U.S involvement in the Vietnam War was justifiedJustified Not JustifiedWith the USSR and China aiding communist forces to attack a good ally of ours it was a justified action to take to send armies to South Vietnam and aid in the defense of our ally.All in all sending soldiers to defend South Vietnam and invade the North would have been as justified as invading Nazi held Europe.… the draft is currently a legitimate and constitutional form of the United States to recruit soldiers in a time of war and always has been. To argue that during the Vietnam war drafting was unjustified and the theft of one's liberties would mean Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Wilson were opposed to civil liberties.We in fact did not pull out after "failing", as my opponent claims. We began to pull out as a result of Nixon's Vietnamization program which was designed to gradually return the control and responsibility of the fight to the South Vietnamese army.Soldiers and civilians die by large numbers in every war, to say the Vietnam war was unjustified on the basis of number of people who died would mean all wars are wrong and every instance of armed conflict is unjustified.… but South Vietnam was fighting to defend themselves which is the most justified reason forever going to war.And to say that there wasn't anything gained, which I assume you are referring to mean as, effectively ending the war by taking North Vietnam by force, would not mean the war was justified, simply poorly conducted by U.S. politicians. After the U.S. left, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia committed a massacre of more than 2,000,000+ civilians in 4 years by executing the intellectuals and subjecating everyone else to slave labor, effectively oppressing Cambodia and making the people more poverty stricken and killing up to more than 3 million people. Had a strong U.S. presence still been in Vietnam such a government committing such murders would have been stopped or prevented by forces from the neighbouring nation of South VietnamAs long as the U.S. was in South Vietnam, South Vietnam was well defended and well supplied to fight the remainder of the war themselves. The U.S. goal was accomplished with 58,000 U.S. deaths while killing up 1.1 million communist soldiers successfully defending South Vietnam for the time we were there while preparing the ARVN for when we left.Using hindsight we now know of the multiple atrocities committed against humanity after the U.S. left Vietnam. Millions of Cambodians were massacred, millions more were poverty stricken, thousands of South Vietnamese supporters were sent to concentration camps, hundreds of thousands were forced to evacuate and Vietnam is still oppressive against political, sexual and religious minorities.These men were forced to join the army and made very little money and were not given an option to pursue a better career. Whatever was gained from the Vietnam War it was not worth this blatant taking away of the rights of American citizens.Looking back now, knowing that the U.S. would fail in it's objectives, makes the war unjustified.Out of the more than 2.5 million army personnel who served in Vietnam, more than 58,000 were killed …The draft takes everyday men and forces them to gointo battle and fight for causes which they may not believe in. It is a violation of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.Just because something has not been yet ruled unconstitutional does not make it right.If our objective was to defend our ally against theirCommunist aggressors, we failed.I am saying that in hindsight if we were to see that so many of our own soldiers died only to fail at our objective in becoming involved the Vietnam War would not have been justified.My point is that while the outcome may have been positive, the means to achieve that outcome were unwarranted and wrong.Over 58,000 American soldiers died over the course of that war. And you are claiming that the only reason hundreds of thousands of men were forced to travel halfway across the world to fight in hostile territory where more than 50,000 of them died was so that we couldkeep North Vietnam out of South Vietnam for a measly ten years? The Vietnam War was a colossal failure if I ever saw one.My opponent argues that the Vietnam War was a success because we successfully defended the South Vietnamese while we were there. However this makes no sense in that just two years after we left the North Vietnamese took over. My opponent seems to think that as long as S. Vietnam didn't fall under our watch everything is okay.I am disputing that our involvement helped other than to simply delay the North Vietnamese take over and to kill 50,000 American soldiers.Article: Was US military intervention in Vietnam justified?Justified Not JustifiedOther critics question the morality of the American involvement, pointing to what they see as the lack of proportionality between the level of violence the U.S. forces used and the importance of the goals being pursued and the likelihood of achieving them. Once again, however, this critical approach to tactical military policy neither addresses the strategic importance of defending South Vietnam nor means that there were no alternate policies that could havebeen successful.The decisions by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations to resist communist encroachment from North Vietnam into South Vietnam was thus entirely in keeping with U.S. policy of containment as it was practiced at the time.There were five other reasons that prompted the U.S. intervention.The first argument for intervention was based on the Munich analogy.U.S. strategy in Vietnam drew from the Munich experience was straightforward: a greedy dictator cannot be appeased; the more he is given the stronger and more ambitious he becomes; and eventually, and inevitably, he will threaten vital American interests, at which point the United States will have to make a stand.The second argument for U.S. intervention in Vietnam was the recognition of the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China.U.S. decisionmakers were convinced that China was encouraging and assisting North Vietnam to attack the South as part of a Chinese master plan to take over Asia.The third reason was the Soviet Union's support for what it called "wars of national liberation."The Kennedy administration became convinced that Vietnam was a test case for this new Soviet policy, one that had to be thwarted.The fourth reason had to do with an argument voiced by many: while free markets were suitable for advanced societies, command economies and planning were more suitable for Third World countries in the early stages of economic development.It was thus important to make a stand in Vietnam, not only to prevent a communist takeover, but also to show the efficacy of Western-style economic and social development plans.The fifth reason had to do with domestic politics.Domestic pressures for intervening in Vietnam against communist aggression were intense, and prudent politicians felt they could not defy such pressures without risk.In deciding whether to use armed force, policymakers invariably take into account national interest and moral issues, as they see them.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.Apart from the national-security issue, policymakers also believed that the Vietnam War was (in Ronald Reagan's words) "a noble cause." … since South Vietnam was a victim of international aggression, the United States was fighting to uphold international law and order…. the United States was protecting the human rights of the South Vietnamese, fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy against communist totalitarianism.No part of the national-security and moral justifications was persuasive.Whatever its persuasiveness as an account of the consequences of allowing international aggression to succeed, the domino theory was inapplicable to the Vietnamese conflict if any one of the following propositions were true: the evolution in the South was initially an indigenous one; Northern intervention in the South was a response to prior American intervention; or North Vietnam was not a separate state from South Vietnam. In fact, all three were true.Moreover, even if there had been international aggression by North Vietnam, one state, against South Vietnam, a different state, the domino theory would still have been inapplicable unless several further requirements were met: North Vietnam had to have both the intention and capability to engage in more widespread expansion throughout Southeast Asia; North Vietnam had to be acting as an instrument of China; and even if that were the case, China had to have both the intention and capability of widespread expansionism throughout Asia. Even at that time most scholars of Chinese foreign policy were arguing that China had neither the capabilities nor the inclination to follow radically expansionist policies, but rather was basically defensive, pragmatic, and cautious.Finally, of course, the most decisive refutation of the domino theory came in 1975 in the aftermath of communist victory in Vietnam. The only subsequent spread of communism in Southeast Asia-let alone beyond-was into Laos and Cambodia.In the Western system of ethics, the just war philosophy provides a commonly accepted moral language and set of principles by whichto evaluate war. This philosophy holds that war is morally allowable only when several moral criteria have been satisfied. The mostimportant criteria are jus ad bellum, or just cause; proportionality; and jus in bello, or just methods of warfare. The Vietnam War was amoral failure in all three respects.The just-cause principle mandates that wars be fought only for unambiguously moral purposes, such as self-defense, the maintenance of international order, or, in certain extremecases, the upholding of basic human rights in another state.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.… U.S. intervention in Vietnam from 1954 through 1973 was to keep in power anti-communist 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 self-determination …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. In short, far from serving the purposes of nonaggression, freedom, democracy, or self determination 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.… 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 implausible-the American role in Vietnam expanded; the probability of success declined; and the economic, political, and, above all, human costs mounted.The core principle of jus in bello (just methods of warfare) 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.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.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."… 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. ................
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