Was the Vietnam War Necessary?

The long and short of it is that the Americans were bursting with their proud all-conquering power in those years and it had to explode somewhere. Vietnam was the country picked. Johnson and his like took it for granted the USA was bound to win by simply unleashing shattering bombing terror on the peasant Vietnamese. How could they withstand the millions of tons of bombs? Johnson's National Security Adviser Walt Whitman Rostow (what a satirical name !) asked the British counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson in 1965 how long he thought Hanoi would take to surrender: three weeks or six weeks? (See Thompson's autobiography, "Make for the Hills", 1988.) By the time American leaders realised the Vietnamese Communists were packed with guts and would never quit fighting no matter how much they were bombed the US public had lost the will to continue the war and the only thing America could do was run out.

Of course the Vietnam War was worth fighting - to deflate American arrogance once and for all and to secure Vietnamese unity and honor.

Robert McNamara’s mea culpa book was highly instructive into how the USA became enmeshed in Vietnam. It came of the back of Joe McCarthy whipping up the hysteria against Communism. His U.N.-American campaign had depleted the personal within the State Department and CIA whom had good knowledge of the history ,culture and national aspiration of Indochina. So the USA blundered in, in which ignorance and perhaps this thing of American Exceptionalism played an undue role. The rest is history. An army can beat another army, but it cannot defeat a whole people’s whom will doggedly wear the occupiers down. The parallel now in 2018, is the depletion of State Department resources, and the gaining of power of the military hawks whom think everything can be gained by force- maybe in the short term they win the battle- but the long term means loosing the war. The wise know their limitations, and are also aware of consequence.

My uncle, Joe Alsop, was responsible for the war more than any other man. He had JFK's ear and full attention, had JFK over for dinner frequently in Georgetown. He had Lyndon Johnson's mind in an unescapable wrestling hold, a head-lock....oh, the dread Communist Menace. A real war-monger. The John Bolton of his era. No, much more powerful. At my parent's house at dinner, I think it was 1967, he called me a traitor for refusing to die for Dean Rusk, Lyndon Johnson and for his own warped sense of reality. Sick.

"Political calculations may have played a role" is correct but would have been more precise to say did instead of may. Republican beat the drum of soft on Communism every chance that they could. LBJ knew that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would turn the South into a Republican stronghold as Republicans played the race card from that time into the present. So in essence he put the lives of Vietnamese and Americans in great peril for his political future and that of the Democratic Party.

My question is, "Why is it easier for the US, and many other "liberal" democracies, to accept the tenants of just about any authoritarian form of government other than Communism?" I suspect the easy answer is Money. But that may be too easy... USN 1968 -71 Viwt Nam 1968

Pursuing the war in Vietnam has to be viewed in the context of the countries perceived fear of the communist menace. We were coming out of the fifties, McCarthy hearings and "duck and cover" in schools. In retrospect we were wrong to view the communist threat as worthy of serious concern but we became trapped by our own rhetoric. We were sucked into the war gradually through stupidity which was bad enough but the Iraq war was worse -we did that with full and detailed evaluation. Both were unnecessary and wasteful of blood and treasure. I was fortunate to have personally missed both conflicts but have great empathy for those who served.

Was the Vietnam War Necessary? Or for that matter were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan necessary or any conflicts that that the US is currently engaging in Africa and Syria necessary?

As a draft age boy in the late sixties, I can recall the terrible emotional toll that the war placed on Johnson and, by extension, all of us who were for or against the war. It was the sheer weight of the loss of our young men that compelled more young men to go to their deaths to avenge and justify the deaths of those who had gone before them. LBJ, faced with the choice of admitting defeat or forging ahead, dreaded having to face the parents and siblings of our fallen heroes, and admitting that he had thrown their lives away for a lost cause. America has never, to this day, been able to face the ramifications of defeat in Vietnam.

Johnson was trying to make some sort of deal with North Vietnam up to the 68 US elections. Nixon got to President Theiu and convinced him that he would get a better deal from him. Nixon is totally responsible for those 'extra' 20k American deaths. Cambodia was lost to the Khmer Rouge in 1970 when the US backed a coup that kicked out Sihanouk and destroyed any further pretense of Cambodian 'neutrality'. Southern Laos was ceded to the Pathet Lao and the NVA around 1965, but the CIA kept up its covert war for many years. A better question would be what did South East Asia look like in 1965. Malaysia and Indonesia were fighting a communist uprising as were the Philippines and Thailand. Cambodia and Thailand were afraid of Communist Vietnam. A US presence was needed for Thailand, if no where else.

In the absence of a threatened attack or actual attack on America or an American ally involving an existential threat to American interests and values no war including the Vietnam War is necessary. And if war is necessary the President should ask Congress to declare and pay for war after debate.

It is not realistic to say that the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975 contributed to the Communist victory in neighboring Cambodia. The Communist victory in Cambodia happened first. If one traces the paths by which Communist personnel and resources moved in Indochina, it was much more a matter of going through Laos and Cambodia to reach South Vietnam than going through South Vietnam to reach Cambodia and Laos.

As other s have pointed out, it is misleading of Mr Lawrence to say that "Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975 unquestionably contributed to Communist victories in neighboring Cambodia and Laos, precisely as Johnson had predicted." It totally leaves out the fact that those countries were destabilized by the US dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped on Europe during the second world war, and by the US destabilizing Sihanouk in Cambodia enabling the Khmer Rouge to take over and perpetuate their genocidal killing fields. Far from the North Vietnamese supporting the Khmer Rouge--they invaded Cambodia to drive out the Khmer Rouge, while the US shamefully supported the perpetrators of the massacres.

In short, the war in Vietnam was totally unnecessary, and those 55,000 Americans died in vain, sacrificed on the altar of national foolishness.

Its not that the politicians had overly optimistic hope of "winning", but that they were overly pessimistic of the consequences of losing. To think that US policy makers could have more impact on a country like Laos than either China or Vietnam given the geographical constructs is absurd. And, to quibble slightly with the author, Cambodia could have remained a neutralist country with a tilt towards the Chinese axis if Prince Sihanouk had remained in power. Despite his many flaws, he remained the only popular, unifying figure throughout the country ( less so in the urban areas as anti-viet sentiment was whipped up). He served the Chinese as a somewhat friend in the non-aligned movement and they offer protection from Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge were relatively small and poorly armed prior to Sihanouk's overthrow even skirmishing with NVA troops. They were kept around as an insurance policy and with Sihanouk overthrown and the astrologer general Lon Nol now aligned with the US in a campaign to evict the NVA and VC from Cambodia ( delusion at its finest), Hanoi and Beijing decided to cash in on their policy.

So John Bolton was correct that “dying in some rice paddy” in Vietnam would have been pointless. The adage about broken clocks comes to mind.

Because Johnson could not bring himself to accept this facts from th CIA and from McNamara my generation lost 50,000 young men and the Vietnamese many many more in a war that should not have happened. And the shame of it is that we keep fighting the last war which could not and can not be justified. And now with the most unqualified president and his new NSC head John Bolton, we still have not learned the lessons

I do not think it is out of line to point out that some of the richest men on earth, then and now, make their money on wars. That money buys political power to this day, just as it did then. The masters of war rule the world today as surely as they did then, as Eisenhower warned they would.

Was the Vietnam War Necessary? It's a trick question. No war is necessary. People engage in warfare because they believe in violence as a means to an end. They believe what they've been told despite the mountainous evidence to the contrary and so are the willing victims of the violence industry. Every tank, every gun, every shiny bayonet, wouldn't be any more lethal than a church-mouse were they not underwritten by a steadfast belief in violence. In war, nobody wins, nothing is won, everybody loses. You can believe that.

How is this even still a question? I thought we liberals had figured this one out decades ago. For a simple and enlightening answer check out my favorite Micheal Moore film, Canadian Bacon. There is a scene where the villain of the story (the head of an arms company that seems to have a monopoly) explains why he and his "good buddy" lyndon Johnson staged the gulf of tonkin incident and the next day the senate voted 98-2 to send combat troops to vietnam.

Almost seems like the author gives credibility to the domino theory at the beginning of the article. Pol Pot’s takeover of Cambodia was not the result of the North’s takeover of South Vietnam. It was primarily the result of the radicalization of swaths of Cambodians due to Nixon’s destructive and unauthorized foray into the region during the war. Hard to think that would happen if we didn’t go into Southeast Asia in the first place.

As with the Middle East thirty years later, our invasion of Vietnam drew on ignorance and the fatal assumption that everybody wants to be like us. An intellectual hegemony prevailed here that implied a primitive mind easily molded by us would lead the Vietnamese away from Ho Chi Minh since he wasn’t our idea of a workable leader. He wanted no further foreign dictates and that meant us in our turn. Eisenhower gave over the future of policy to Nixon who immediately corrupted the CIA role in Southeast Asia from intelligence to destabilization, a move assuring a bloodbath and leading to the shame of CIA as torturers in the south. Dick Helms quietly swore revenge on Nixon (Alexander Butterfield was his protege). There were no dominoes to fall other than those in Cambodia and Laos, dominoes that fell because Nixon and Kissinger invaded both thereby transforming the Khmer Rouge from a small gathering of ideologues in jungles to an army of many thousands in one year. What followed is too gruesome even for Shakespeare. But then Jerry Springer hosted a Miss Universe or Miss World or Missed Opportunities pageant from HonChi Minh city and the question of whether the war needed to be fought was answered.

Even if those illogical fears were true, efforts would have been better spent reinforcing our own culture against them.

A fascinating essay. The passage “I am convinced,” Johnson declared, “that by seeing this struggle through now, we are greatly reducing the chances of a much larger war — perhaps a nuclear war.” closely mirrors several conversations that I have had with Dean Rusk's son on his father's belief that credibility in Vietnam was a crucial component of preventing a possible nuclear war. The CIA estimate is part of a larger excellent collection of CIA analysis on Vietnam published in 2005 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the defeat of South Vietnam. It also is a great illustration of the principal that regardless of the quality of analysis the policy makers will exercise their judgment and make their decisions.

Many,many thanks for publishing this brilliant series on Vietnam '67, before and after. It should be assigned reading in every American high school and military unit.

As with many of the foreign entanglements the United States has become involved in since World War II, the Vietnam War was narrowly understood in terms of our familiar Cold War framework--communist vs. capitalist. However, I would argue that one of the biggest driving forces for Vietnam's civil war (which we probably should have stayed out of) was the Hoa's (ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam) total domination of the Vietnamese economy, even though they only made (and make) up about 2% of the total population. The Hoa minority completely controlled the Vietnamese economy at the time of the Vietnam War (as they do today), and the driving motivation for communism was the desire of the majority indigenous Kinh Vietnamese to redistribute wealth in their society more equitably. Today, the situation is purportedly very similar in Vietnam, with the Hoa ethnic Chinese minority dominating the Vietnamese economy even more than they did fifty years ago.

Johnson's notion that a Communist victory anywhere in the world would eventually jeopardize American security echoed President Kennedy's stirring rhetoric in his inaugural address about our willingness to pay any price to protect liberty. Johnson's policy and Kennedy's inspiring words, however, ignored the unsustainable cost of defining every Third World conflagration as a Manichean struggle between freedom and tyranny. Behind the thinking of Kennedy, Johnson and their advisers lay the policy of containment, a strategy for coping with potential Russian aggression in Europe developed in the 1940s by George Kennan. This diplomat favored a flexible, mainly non-military response to the Kremlin's efforts to undermine non-Communist governments in Western Europe. But Kennedy and Johnson interpreted Kennan's vague language as a clarion call for military intervention in the Third World, an area in turmoil because of anti-colonial struggles. By portraying these conflicts as examples of Communist aggression, Johnson threatened to embroil the US in permanent warfare. His decision to expand Kennedy's intervention into Vietnam, an area few Americans knew or cared about, forced him to garner support by portraying the war as a struggle between good and evil. This approach trapped him, because the American people believed him. Thus, they expected him to win.