Neither was North Vietnam, so if that’s an important criteria for legitimacy, both were in the same boat.

That’s precisely my point. I’m not trying to score points off South Vietnam at all.

The legitimacy or otherwise of the Geneva Agreements is an old and barren argument.

My interest is far more modest than attempting to prove the rights and wrongs of the various claims about morality.

Rather, my aim is to attempt to understand how the US understood its own role in South East Asia. The US was and is a nation of laws with a superb constitution. The great strength of the US has been its adherence to its foundational principles, as enunciated in its Constitution.

This constitution requires the different branches of government to act lawfully, including in its diplomacy and warfare.

Constitutionally, Congress must agree to the Declaration of War resolution, usaully proposed by the President.

Quite evidently, the US ceased to act lawfully in relation to South East Asia. If you doubt this, what exactly were US war aims in SE Asia after the repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in January 1971?

Can you point to a Congressional Resolution post January 1971 that states the reasons for and the desired outcome of US bellicosity in South East Asia?

Much loose talk revolves around comparison of WWII and Vietnam. However, one powerful contrast can be made. In late 1941 Congress endorsed the US Declaration of War on both Japan and Germany, and Congress endorsed the demand for unconditional surrender. The US remained steadfast to this demand until it was achieved. For contrast’s sake, note how irresolute were the serial statements of US war aims in relation to South East Asia.

“Moreover, South Vietnam was never a member of the United Nations.”

Neither was North Vietnam, so if that’s an important criteria for legitimacy, both were in the same boat.

It intrigues me that people just assume that SV was the “illegitimate breakaway regime”, as you put it, and just assume that NV was the rightful owner of sovereignty over the entire nation. Who gave NV that sovereignty? God? The Buddha?

The fact remains that, in the aftermath of the French Indochina War, two separate states had coalesced into being. Although the details are not precisely the same, it was broadly similar to the formation of East and West Germany, and North and South Korea.

Although there is only one Korean people and ultimately one Korean nation, it can hardly be argued that either the ROK or the DPRK owns exclusive rights to that sovereignty, and would be entitled to reunify by force. So too with North and South Vietnam.

At this point, people always respond, “Ah, but what about the Geneva Accords and the elections they were supposed to have?”

To which the response is: SV never agreed to have those elections, and had quite reasonable fears that they would not be free and fair in the north.

You can only consider SV bound to those elections if you consider the South Vietnamese to be simply a chattel of the French, which they could dispose of in any manner they saw fit.

I doubt most lefties would take such a view of any other decolonising people, so why make a special exception for SV?

However, the US did recognise the sovereignty of the Saigon regime. This situation was parallel to the two China conundrum blundered into by the US, when the US recognised the sovereignty of Chiang Kai Shek over the whole of China, despite his defeat in the Chinese Civil War.

Thus during the entire era of the conflict, by implication the US reserved the right to impose regime change on the whole of Vietnam, not merely protect a friendly regime in the South.

But to add treachery to incompetence, even though the US insisted that the Saigon regime was sovereign, nevertheless the Paris Accords were negotiated behind Saigon’s back. Saigon had no input into matters vital to its future.

Thus the US negotiated with a regime it didn’t recognise behind the back of a regime it did recognise, prejudicing the interests of its supposed ally.

After the repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. the US had no rationale for its effort in South East Asia that it was willing to acknowledge.

The war aims of the US, as enunciated in the Paris Peace Accords, represented a denial of the primary rationale for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — sovereignty for the Saigon regime and non-recognition of the Hanoi regime.

Also, from what I understand, the division of Vietnam in 1954 into North and South was something the U.S. backed despite not having the support of the Geneva Accords, and was a historically new division (Vietnam had been composed of three separate nations before the French took over).

The territorial integrity of neutral Cambodia and Laos was well and truly disrespected by all sides during the 10,000 Day War. And the Khmer Rouge had a great friend in the Reagan administration when it joined with the PRC to veto the allocation of Cambodia’s United Nations General Assembly seat to a representative of the Heng Samrin government. Moreover, Lee Kuan Yew, no friend of marxism leninism, claims that China, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand spent more than $1.3 billion in a largely secret program in the 1980s to support Khmer Rouge in Cambodia fighting Vietnamese troops and allied Cambodian forces.

When sympathising with suffering neutrals and non-combattants in South East Asia, there is plenty of blame to go around.

But overriding any attempt by either side to attempt to score moral points about this war is the central issue that the US fought an unjust war when they acknowledged to themselves that they were incapable of achieving their war aims.

A primary criterion for a just war is that a belligerent must have a “serious prospect of success”. Perhaps Eisenhower, Kennedy and initially Johnson could argue that they sincerely beleived that the US had a reasonable chance of achieving their stated war aims — that is a stable, friendly government in Saigon.

But in March 1968 Johnson acknowledged that this task was beyond his administration. Nixon never contradicted Johnson’s acknowledgement, yet massively bombed two neutral nations and invaded one neutral nation.

Moreover, South Vietnam was never a member of the United Nations. This added de jure credence to the de facto claims that the Hanoi regime was attempting to unite a nation that had been sundered illegally.

This was the claim of the US Federal Government in relation to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The United States refused to recognise the legitimacy of the CSA and threatened war on any nation that did. (The British discovered a formula whereby HM Government recognised the CSA as a belligerent without ever going so far as to grant formal recognition.)

There is nothing novel about the attitude of either the US or the Hanoi regime to illegitimate breakaway regimes.

Interestingly, the grounds for US bellicosity in Vietnam were enunciated in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This resolution served as the legal justification for the war so far as US constitutionality was concerned. Yet in January 1971 Nixon signed the repeal of the Tonkin Resolution on the grounds that the US was no longer trying to win the conflict, as defined by the Tonkin Resolution. Thus, de jure, after January 1971 Nixon acknowledged that he had no legitimate war aims in Vietnam beyond the orderly withdrawal of US armed forces.

Thus, when the Wooda, Cooda, Shooda school of revisionists claim that the US “wooda cooda, shooda” won the war, the first question that has to be asked is “what war?”

Of course, the Wooda, Shooda, Cooda” revisionists could take refuge in the Nixon dictum that if the president does it, it is therefore legal. Constitutionally, this theory argues, the President is not compelled to provide any rationale for his actions, or he can provide an infinite number of contradictory rationales for his actions.

Congress and the Supreme Court begged to differ.

And you really are fooling yourself if you believe the US entered the war to protect Cambodians and Laotians, let alone South Vietnamese. Hell, they couldn’t even the support of the UK.

However, all that is essentially moot. Perhaps the US did have some justification for becoming involved – if I was put the shoes of Kennedy in the 1960′s I honestly don’t know what decision I would have made. But there’s no way you can claim there was justification for the tactics it used while there, particularly the use of Agent Orange, and to a lesser extent, napalm. There’s certainly no excusing the flagrant disregard for the lives of innocent civilians, which many soldiers openly admitted to (read the transcript link I posted above).