Just War Principles the History

Just War Principles

The history of the United States is filled with a number of wars which most Americans feel were completely justified. However, it may be that the victories achieved by America in the past have created the illusion of a just war. Whether or not the many conflicts the United States has engaged in were just or not were just is still a matter of debate, but there is one conflict that most Americans can agree upon that was not a just war. The fact that most feel that American forces did not gain a victory in Vietnam allows for a more complete examination of whether or not the conflict that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives was indeed a just war.

The first and foremost criteria for a just was is that it can only be waged as a last resort, after all non-violent options have been exhausted. In the case of Vietnam, the United States basically created the nation of South Vietnam from the remnants of French Indochina, and since this act of nation-building was against the will of the majority of the indigenous people, the United States in effect created the situation in which war was inevitable. Secondly, a just war can only be waged by a legitimate authority and this was not the case in the Vietnam conflict. The Congress of the United States passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President the power to wage the conflict, however, "it later turned out that the Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest American officials had lied to the American public" (Zinn, 476) Gaining the "authority" to conduct a war under false circumstances de-legitimizes that authority; in other words, by lying about the basis for the war, the entire war becomes illegitimate. A just war also needs to redress a grievance suffered by the nation going to war. The nation of Vietnam did not inflict any grievance on the United States. As previously stated, the incident that was presented as the justification for the war turned out to be false. Therefore, the conflict that was begun to address that grievance was a fraudulent conflict and unjust.

Not only were the reasons for starting the war somewhat dubious, the American military did not have a realistic plan for winning the war. Once the United States became involved and it became increasingly apparent that the war was not being won, the United States simply fell back on its dependence on superior firepower. In an attempt to win a war that it had no idea how to win, the United States dropped more ordinance on Vietnam that they did in all of World War II. And the goal of the war was not to establish a lasting peace but to force the North Vietnamese to accept an American backed corrupt state in the South, and to do this by destroying as much of their infrastructure as possible. In this endeavor, the United States engaged in a strategy of using disproportionate firepower against the North Vietnamese, and since in the 1960's precision bombing was only a distant dream, the United States killed a great number of innocent civilians.