Vietnam War Justifiable?

I need your opinions, I'm doing a report on Vietnam and whether it was justifiable of The United States to go to war with Vietnam? If so, why? If not, why?

Links and any kind of comments are appreciated, Thank You.....

Justifiable. Whose opinion? For what reason?

If the reason is to slow down the Soviet expansion, blled it of money and material thereby denying that money and resources in other locations, sure. It was justifiable. Understand, everything was viewed through Cold War eyes.

If it was actually to defend a nation from aggression of another nation thereby protecting its chance of blossoming into a democracy, sure. We had a defense agreement with that nation and we were morally expected to do so. We failed miserably. But then again, so did the South Vietnamese incompetent regime.

Funny thing is, Ho Chi Minh was a staunch ally during WWII. After WWII during the Vietnamese struggle for their freedom against France (rather ironic that France, just liberated from Germany, didn't want to release Vietnam) asked that we not help France and that we say nice things about Vietnam in the international scene. What did we do? We help France.

Yup. You know France is appreceative of that as well as everything else. And we lose who would have probably been much better friends.

Good Lord, 10Dead: a long time ago now.
Well who's to say if war is ever justified (turn the other cheek etc.) but generally the Western-Christian concept of the just war revolves around seven criteria:
1.) The war must have a just cause;
2.) It must be waged by a legitimate authority;
3.) It must be formally declared;
4.) It must be fought with a peaceful intention;
5.) It must be a last resort;
6.) There must be reasonable hope of success;
7.) The means used must possess proportionality to the end sought.
you only have to look at the first to see that these are not 100% helpful since who is to define "just"?
You really need to go through these one by one with respect to Vietnam (and remember the "war" was actually a collection of very different conflicts of very different intensity: "escalation" being the buzz word)

I'm not trying to be evasive there, Dead10: just trying to show how almost insolubly complex such questions are:
a pretty useful one-page "rights and wrongs" link here (but you'd need to explore the assertions more fully to get the real flavour of the debate)
www.gliah.uh.edu...