Many Americans believed that the US was fighting a war that the Vietnamese people did not want to be fought for them. To say that the US military participation in Vietnam was not popular in the US is an understatement. Many critics felt that what was going on was a civil war between north and south Vietnam, and that the US was poking its nose into it. This shall resonate years later with the US invasion of Iraq, supposedly to liberate the Middle Eastern country.

The US hand in Vietnam produced varied reactions: some supported the communist effort in Vietnam and hoped for the US ‘imperialist capitalist’ defeat, some thought that Vietnam was an insignificant country not worthy of US military participation, others regarded it as a waste of US resources because the real enemies were China and the Soviet Union.

Vassar College states that “critics of the American intervention claim that the war was unnecessary and immoral and that policymakers in Washington dragged the country into an unwanted war. In contrast, a small group of scholars and military leaders offer an emotional defense of American intervention. A careful examination of the myriad sources reveals that neither view is entirely accurate and that the interplay of events was far more complicated than most accounts suggest” (the wars for Viet Nam: 1945 to 1975, n.d.).

2.5 million lives were lost during the Vietnam War. There were more bombs dropped during this war than in the entire World War II. Agent Orange erased more than 25 percent of Vietnam’s forests. Furthermore, this anti-Communism campaign depleted the US economy at more than $167 billion dollars a year.

But over and above all these, the Vietnam War made the American people scrutinize and question the power of the government’s executive branch, leading to mistrust on the federal government – much like what happened in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal during Nixon’s term.

No war has divided the American public like the Vietnam War did, many say, making one wonder how Bush and the neocons were able to successfully author the Iraq war less than three decades later.

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Via Vassar