Perhaps you're right.
However, the problem with the "just war" concept is that mere men have to figure out what "justice" is in order to launch a "just war."
Eisenhower was certainly a good man, and undoubtedly a great man, but the civil war between North and South Vietnam wasn't a good enough reason to sacrifice what turned out to be 58,000+ American lives for.
The problem is that a man sitting behind a big desk in Washington DC can get the idea that he can press a button on his telephone and save the world, and that's just not the case, especially from 12,000 miles away from the facts on the ground.
Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were advised by men who had been taught that Communism would win, that Communism was a more efficient economic system than Capitalism, that Capitalism had to fight an unequal fight to maintain itself against the onslaught of the next level of human evolution, the stupid pseudo-scientific claptrap drivel theory of a loser and con-man named Karl Marx.
In a way, I don't blame them for deciding as they did, in the post-WWII era, that America should carry on against the Communist world by fighting them in every corner of the world, the domino theory and all that.
But in hindsight it's clear, at least to me: we should have said to Vietnam "fine, go communist, knock yourselves out, but remember that we'll still be here when you finally figure out hour mistake, and we'll be ready to help you rebuild when that day comes."
That would have been the correct response, because the enthralled victim of a con-man and a con-ideology can only save his or herself. All the outsider can do is offer aid and comfort when the scales finally fall from their eyes.
If we had taken that approach, we would have got where we are today anyway, and all those daddies and boyfriends and fiancés would have come home and added to America.
Aha...so you fell for Hanoi Jane's song and dance too.It wasn't a "civil war" any more than Korea was a "civil war".
It wasn’t just Vietnam. The domino theory held sway at the time.
Vietnam itself was of little importance (other than as a domestic political issue, i.e., JFK and LBJ were afraid of a “who lost Vietnam” controversy such as “who lost China” hurt the Democrats a decade before.)
The big prize was Indonesia. And the pro-western Suharto perhaps would not have dared to overthrow the pro-leftist Sukarno in 1965, if it hadn’t been for the US stand in Vietnam. I’m not justifying it; the bloodbath in the 1965 coup in Indonesia was horrendous.
But that was the thinking.
I believe Eisenhower did the right thing in supporting a non-Communist government in South Vietnam. And his policy was successful. When he left office, South Vietnam had a stable government. We had only a few hundred troops in Vietnam serving in an advisory role, and they suffered less than ten casualties.