Vietnam
Far too much blood and ink have been spilled over the Vietnam War for me to do anything but briefly summarize why the United States had no legal basis for waging it.
After the Vietnamese defeated their French occupiers at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they agreed to partition the country temporarily into northern and southern halves pending a nationwide election scheduled for 1956. It soon became obvious, though, that this partition would be anything but temporary: many Vietnamese fled from the communists in the North to find sanctuary with the government sponsored by the United States in the South. According to the United States, it could not allow a nationwide election that might deliver power to the communists, since this would cause the “dominoes” to start falling all around Southeast Asia and beyond. Better to nip the problem in the bud than let it grow out of control. Therefore, over the next several years the United States offered a steady supply of money and military assistance to the government in the South, going so far as to select a head of state and help him rig elections. But events continued to spiral out of control, as a strengthening communist insurgency and a coup d’état against the unpopular and brutal Southern government provoked President Kennedy to send even more military advisors and equipment. The final straw was a pair of confrontations in the Gulf of Tonkin between U.S. military vessels and torpedo boats from the North, which the new President Johnson portrayed as an “armed attack” on the United States. Privately, though, Johnson remarked that the sailors had been shooting at “flying fish” (a National Security Agency report, which was de-classified only in 2005, shows that the United States vessel initiated fire in the first incident and that there was no enemy presence whatsoever in the second). The U.S. Congress swiftly inked a resolution delegating unconstitutional power to President Johnson to declare and wage war on his own. After ten years and over two million deaths (some 58,000 of them American), the United States finally withdrew and allowed the South to fall to the communists.
It cannot be denied that the Vietnamese communists were bloodthirsty thugs. That fact did not, however, justify an American military intervention into the internal affairs of a small and impoverished nation located on the other side of the planet, let alone justify a ten-year war based on an inevitable confrontation sparked by such intervention. The only threat to national security that the United States worried of was a potential one, not an actual or imminent one, meaning that the use of military force in Vietnam was unlawful and violated the Nuremberg Principles. If the United States wished to help Vietnamese people escape communist oppression, it could have offered asylum or provided aid in many ways short of the drastic measures it took, and which ultimately produced a far greater tragedy for all involved.
Far too much blood and ink have been spilled over the Vietnam War for me to do anything but briefly summarize why the United States had no legal basis for waging it.
After the Vietnamese defeated their French occupiers at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they agreed to partition the country temporarily into northern and southern halves pending a nationwide election scheduled for 1956. It soon became obvious, though, that this partition would be anything but temporary: many Vietnamese fled from the communists in the North to find sanctuary with the government sponsored by the United States in the South. According to the United States, it could not allow a nationwide election that might deliver power to the communists, since this would cause the “dominoes” to start falling all around Southeast Asia and beyond. Better to nip the problem in the bud than let it grow out of control. Therefore, over the next several years the United States offered a steady supply of money and military assistance to the government in the South, going so far as to select a head of state and help him rig elections. But events continued to spiral out of control, as a strengthening communist insurgency and a coup d’état against the unpopular and brutal Southern government provoked President Kennedy to send even more military advisors and equipment. The final straw was a pair of confrontations in the Gulf of Tonkin between U.S. military vessels and torpedo boats from the North, which the new President Johnson portrayed as an “armed attack” on the United States. Privately, though, Johnson remarked that the sailors had been shooting at “flying fish” (a National Security Agency report, which was de-classified only in 2005, shows that the United States vessel initiated fire in the first incident and that there was no enemy presence whatsoever in the second). The U.S. Congress swiftly inked a resolution delegating unconstitutional power to President Johnson to declare and wage war on his own. After ten years and over two million deaths (some 58,000 of them American), the United States finally withdrew and allowed the South to fall to the communists.
It cannot be denied that the Vietnamese communists were bloodthirsty thugs. That fact did not, however, justify an American military intervention into the internal affairs of a small and impoverished nation located on the other side of the planet, let alone justify a ten-year war based on an inevitable confrontation sparked by such intervention. The only threat to national security that the United States worried of was a potential one, not an actual or imminent one, meaning that the use of military force in Vietnam was unlawful and violated the Nuremberg Principles. If the United States wished to help Vietnamese people escape communist oppression, it could have offered asylum or provided aid in many ways short of the drastic measures it took, and which ultimately produced a far greater tragedy for all involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment