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to Great Debates
Why
was the United States in Vietnam?
During the Spring of 1965, shortly
after President Lyndon Johnson initiated a policy of bombing North
Vietnam and stepping up ground action in the South, Time magazine
published an editorial defending the President's moves. Entitled
"Viet Nam: The Right War at the Right Time," the essay
appeared in response to a chorus of criticism that erupted on
college campuses, objecting to the war on pragmatic grounds -
that the United States could not win or need not win in order
to safeguard its interests - and for ethical reasons.
Time asserted that the United
States was morally right to intervene in the war because it was
necessary to contain the expansion of the Sino-Soviet bloc; to
fulfill American treaty obligations (including bilateral agreements
with South Vietnam and the terms of the Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO) pact); to protect a pro-western country from
armed totalitarian attack; and to defend American national honor
and credibility. Invoking the so-called "domino theory,"
which held that the loss of South Vietnam would lead inevitably
to the loss of neighboring countries, Time described South Vietnam
as a vital buffer state necessary to halt communist expansion.
It called North Vietnam a "Peking
satellite," and claimed that after winning all of Vietnam,
communists "inevitably...would seek domination of the whole
area." Since the early nineteenth century, Time said, the
United States had grown to a major Pacific maritime power: "To
surrender the Pacific to China now makes no more sense than surrendering
it to Imperial Japan would have in 1941."
The war's critics rejected these
arguments, insisting that American involvement in Vietnam was
not justified either on the grounds of vital national interest
or strong moral imperative. Where Time claimed that American intervention
was justified because the conflict had been caused by foreign
aggression from North Vietnam, anti-war critics maintained that
the struggle in Vietnam was essentially a civil war in which the
United States had no right to intervene.
They noted that Vietnam had been
one country until it was temporarily divided by the Geneva Accords
of 1954, which provided for general elections in 1956 to reunify
the country and that it was the South Vietnamese President, Ngo
Dinh Diem, who refused to honor that agreement. In addition, opponents
of the war rejected that notion that the United States had any
treaty obligation to defend South Vietnam, noting that back in
1955, when the SEATO pact was approved, Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles informed Congress that in the event of communist
subversion "all we have is an undertaking to consult together
as to what to do about it."
The war's critics also rejected
the notion that the war was necessary to halt Chinese expansionism,
noting that Vietnamese history revealed centuries of bitter enmity
between Vietnam and China. In contrast to the war's supporters,
anti-war protesters did not regard the communist world as a monolithic
bloc or (in Time's words) as "an international aggressive
movement," and argued that the opposition to the South Vietnamese
government was overwhelming indigenous, coming from citizens of
South Vietnam.
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Opponents of
the war viewed the Viet Cong as a uneasy coalition of communists
and nationalists and social revolutionaries seeking land reform,
reunification, and expulsion of colonial powers from their
land. Anti-war protests warned prophetically that the strength
of Vietnamese nationalism - one of the strongest currents
in modern Vietnamese history - would lead the opponents of
the Saigon government to accept sacrifice and absorb losses
far greater than the American public would tolerate. |
Time and its critics also clashed
over the question of whether the United States could successfully
fight for democracy by supporting an undemocratic regime in South
Vietnam. Time said "yes": "A democratic regime
is hardly possible in a war-torn country without much democratic
tradition," the magazine argued. "What the critics fail
to admit is that even a bad non-Communist regime is usually subject
to change, but once a Communist regime is established, it is virtually
irreversible."
The war's critics said "no,"
and denounced American military tactics in Vietnam - such as the
use of napalm (jellied gasoline), assassination, and defoliants
- as immoral.
Questions to
think about:
1. Evaluate
the arguments advanced in favor and against American involvement
in the Vietnam War.
2. Which
arguments do you find most compelling?
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