What Are the Causes of the Vietnam War

The Causes, Events, and Aftermath of the Vietnam War. Digital History. “The Vietnam War. ” Digital History. 30 Sept.

2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. . The Vietnam War started as a disagreement between communist North Vietnam and anti-communist South Vietnam. Before this disagreement was a war between Vietnam and the French.

Vietnam received 2. 6 billion dollars in financial support from the United States between 1945 and 1954. Nixon, who was President of the United States at the time, sent in troops to attempt to slow the process of sending troops and supplies from North Vietnam to South Vietnam.If I was a Vietnamese person living in Vietnam at the time I would think this would be an act of injustice by trying to make it an unfair war by removing the supply flow making them starve to death or get surrounded with no weapons. Also I feel that it was unjust of the Vietnamese to accept money from the United States then go to war with us after we provided them with financial support of the French. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Ed.

John Whiteclay Chambers II. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Oxford UP.President John F. Kennedy secretly sent 400 troops to South Vietnamese to fight what was called the counterinsurgency war. I believe this was a move of injustice due to the face that Kennedy did not tell the people of the United States they were going to help support a war over seas. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1961, more than 16,000 military troops in South Vietnamese and more than 100 troops had been killed.

I feel Kennedy’s assassinated was also an act of injustice and I feel that it was also a major cause of us going into the war even more.Four years later in March of the year 1965, President Johnson sustained bombing of targets north of the 17th parallel. Then on March 8th, he dispatched 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. After he dispatched them, the United States was now at war, Declaration or not. I feel this could also be an act of injustice because the people did not have any say in this war and now people were going to be drafted to it. PBS. “Battlefield:Vietnam | Timeline.

” PBS. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. . On May 7, 1954 the Vietnamese forces captured the French command post of Dien Bien Phu.The French commander then gave the order to seize fire.

The battle lasted 55 days and more than 3,000 French troops died and 8,000 were wounded. Viet Minh got the worse of it though. They lost over 8,000 people and over 12,000 wounded. I feel this is injustice because is it really worth it to loose more men than the other side just to capture a fort? In the late 1961’s [pic]President John F. Kennedy orders more help for the South Vietnamese government in its war against the Vietcong.The U. S.

backings included more than 3,000 troops and new equipment. On November 4th 1961, two days before the presidential election, the Vietcong dropped mortar shells onto Bien Hoa Air Base killing 4 soldiers, and 76 wounded along with five B-57 bombers destroyed. I feel that this was injustice because while all of us are busy voting for the new President the Vietcong got us by surprise. “Vietnam War. ” The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.

com. 6 Oct. 2010 .In part, the war was a legacy of France’s colonial rule, which ended in 1954 with the French army’s catastrophic defeat at Dienbienphu and the acceptance of the Geneva Conference agreements. Elections scheduled for 1956 in South Vietnam for the reunification of Vietnam were canceled by President Ngo Dinh Diem. I believe this action of cancelling the election after the French defeat and even after accepting the Geneva Conference agreements. Although his action was denounced by Ho Chi Minh, I still feel this was injustice toward the people of Vietnam.

Diem’s government faced increasingly opposition of the Viet Cong who were insurgents aided by North Vietnam. Another act of injustice near the end of the war was the massacre at My Lai. This was a massacre of many Vietnamese UNARMED citizens by UNITED STATES soldiers. In the course of the operation about 347 citizens were shot to death. To me, this incident going unknown until autumn of 1969 even though the event took place on March 16, 1968, is almost just as bad as it happening itself. “Vietnam War. ” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.

Ed. William A.Darity, Jr. 2nd ed. Vol. 8. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.

612-617. Gale World History in Context. Web. 4 Oct. 2010. In 1946, U. S.

president Franklin Roosevelt had written to the British ambassador that he believed “Indochina should not go back to the French, but that it should be administered by international trusteeship. ” I think this is a bit of injustice to the French because the United States should not have intervened in the first place and let every other country do what we want rather than us coming in and trying to make it better for them.In reality though the only thing we are trying to do is make money for ourselves or make it better for us. Eventually the United States sided with South Vietnam because the United States where afraid of communism and that’s what North Vietnam wanted. Why we got involved in this blows my mind because we don’t live there, we won’t be affected by this so why do we care if the people in Vietnam want communism or not. This is how the causes of the Vietnam War resulted in Injustice. Wikipedia.

“Vietnam War. ” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 03 Oct. 2010. Web. 04 Oct. 010.

. In the post-war era, the United States struggled to learn the lessons of military intervention. The casualties of the Vietnam side were 1. 1 million dead and 600,000 soldiers wounded. Civilian deaths by Operation Rolling Thunder were between 52,000 and 182,000. I feel this injustice of killing a possible 100,000 Vietnamese women and children is just completely outrageous. After the war in Vietnam Chemical affected the Vietnamese people by causing a poisoning in the food chain, a change in the landscape, and it also caused birth defects and many diseases.

As of 2006, the Vietnamese government had estimated that 4,000,000 victims of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam. Also, between 1961 and 1967, the U. S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of concentrated herbicides over 6 million acres of crops and trees, affecting an estimated 13% of South Vietnam’s land. Now killing the women and children during the bombing was bad enough. Now they started poisoning food and tried to get them into RVN-controlled areas. I feel this is injustice because of all the unneeded deaths of civilian causalities.