WHAT MADE VIETNAM A ‘JUST’ WAR
Fifty years after the war in Vietnam, Americans are still debating the morality of U.S. involvement there—the reasons the government went in and the way it got out. Political scientist Eric Patterson has compiled a checklist of sorts that provides one way of judging the justness of the war-making strategies pursued by four presidents.
In Just American Wars: Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Military History, Patterson, a professor at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University and a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, lays out eight principles that serve as the basis for ethical, moral conduct in war. He traces those principles to writings of philosophers such as Cicero in ancient Rome and St. Augustine in the early years of Christianity.
The eight principles of ethical warfare are legitimate authority, just cause, right intent, likelihood of success, proportionality of ends, last resort, proportionality in conduct of the war, and discrimination in conduct of the war.
Patterson, a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, uses those principles to look at ethical dilemmas in various aspects of American wars from the Revolution to the post-9/11 world. In the Vietnam chapter, he focuses on the war aims of U.S. presidents and whether those aims were pursued for legitimate reasons (just cause) and with honorable motivations (right intent).
Reflecting on the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when French forces trying maintain their colonial rule in Vietnam lost a war against a communist-led independence movement, President Dwight D. Eisenhower observed, “You have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” Eisenhower had not only Indochina in mind, but the recent war in Korea and “loss” of China to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949.
Sixteen years later, Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard
