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What were the causes of the Vietnam War In list form?

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1. Don't listen to Peter Pete...he's a dumb ass. The Vietnam War started long before the US involvement. 1.) Vietnam was a French colony along with Laos, Thailand (I think), and a couple other places known as French Indo-China. 2.) The Communist North Vietnamese decided they were finished with it and attacked the Southern Loyalist Vietnamese. Those were the two things that started the Vietnam Civil War. Now, the US started because: 1.) The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) was massacring innocent Southern Civilians (ever hear of the Hmong?) 2.) They were trying to stem the Communists from gaining power. Hope that helps. There was a lot of minor details like coup d'etat's and assassinations and other shit that factored in, but those are the main points.
2. The list is below, but it is too much to write. http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t3w30vietnamwar.htm
3. ~There is no such thing as a 'short' answer to this question. After France fell to the Nazis, Vichy France took over Indochina. Vichy France let Japan use Indochina as a jumping off point from which to prosecute the Second Sino-Japanese War. A long standing group of nationalists called the Viet Minh had been fighting a guerrilla war for independence for decades. In 1940, one of the Viet Minh leaders was a guy named Ho Chi Minh. FDR allied with Ho and the Viet Minh, sending them aid, arms supplies and advisers to help them in their fight for freedom and independence from Japan and Vichy France. This was one of the provocations that caused the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor which expanded the Second Sino-Japanese War into WWII. In that regard, FDR got what he wanted. Throughout the war, the Viet Minh were our allies and we pretended that we supported their independence movement. At Yalta and Tehran, however, FDR, Stalin and Churchill agreed that after the war Vietnam would be divided into north and south with the British occupying the South and the nationalist Chinese occupying the North. Nobody let Ho and the Vietnamese people in on that little secret until it was sprung on them at Tokyo Bay in August '45. Of course, the French were ticked off. They wanted their empire back. By 46, the Brits gave it to them with US blessings. Mao had defeated Chaing and the Chinese were out of the picture. The Viet Mihn didn't take it lying down and they finally ousted the French in 1954. By the Geneva Accords of 1954, reunification was supposed to happen via internationally supervised elections in 1956. Ho would have won in a landslide. He was the Vietnamese equivalent of George Washington by then. The US was hated for the double-crosses at Tehran and Yalta, at Tokyo Bay and in '46. The French warned Ike to stay out because the Viet Minh were not a force he could beat and that the Vietnamese desire for reunification and independence was overwhelming. The French also warned Ike that Ngo Dinh Diem was a corrupt incompetent madman and should be avoided. Ike ordered CIA and the US military to make sure Diem won his "election" in the south. Diem did, carrying some districts by more than 150% of the registered vote. His goons also beat and killed, under the watchful eyes of his US sponsors, opponents and those who voted against him as they left the polls. Within a few months after his election, Diem had more than 100,000 political prisoners in his prisons. Even though he had cornered the Opium trade in the Golden Triangle, even though he had pilfered the national treasury and even though he was raping his people with unconscionable taxes, Diem decided he was wasting money on prisons so he started killing the opposition - with US assistance and protection. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, died at Diem/CIA/US hands. These were not 'communists, although some were. They were nationalists and political dissidents. When '56 rolled around, naturally Diem was hated and Ho's popularity grown even greater. Ho would have won in a landslide, South as well as North. Diem refused to allow the elections. The US backed him. The ranks of the Viet Minh swelled with new enrollments/enlistments in the South as well as the North. Some were communists. Most were nationalists. Hatred of Diem and his puppet masters in DC led directly to the formation of other nationalist and opposition groups like the NLF, the Cao Dai, the Hao Hoa and the Binh Xuyen, all with the united goal of ousting Diem and reunifying their country into a single independent nation. Given the US support of Diem, and the earlier US support of the French between '46 and '54, naturally the new Vietnam would be either neutral or in the Chinese or Soviet camp. FDR, HST and Ike had guaranteed that much. Vietnam was a logical follow-up to Korea, although the roots were different, somewhat, in Korea. I won't go there but don't believe for a second that the US was not involved in starting that one or that it was prompted by the Chinese and or Soviets. I can't believe that with all the information out there, people still believe those myths. These were the days of Joe McCarthy, "Brinksmanship" and the "Domino Theory". Anything or anyone not staunchly pro-American was branded communist and evil. Very little attention was paid to the truth. If Oil or the United Fruit Company were at risk because a reform leader was sick and tired of the rape and pillage of his country, heads were going to roll. Ike knocked over more dominoes than the Kremlin ever dreamed of, but who's counting? Vietnam was just one of Ike's playgrounds. No one (in Washington) cared that Diem was a totalitarian murderer who had denied his people any vestige of personal freedom or human dignity or even their very lives. He was "our boy". Ike and the CIA had just toppled two democratically elected reform governments and replaced them with totalitarian dictators in highly publicized coups which the CIA bragged about to no end in the international media. In one, Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz was replaced by Castillo Armas in 1954. Our buddy Anastasio Somoza helped with that one. (He may have felt beholden, since we put him in power a decade or so earlier.) In 1953, Mohammed Mosaddeq was replaced by Shah Reza Pahlavi. To make sure the Shah held onto the Peacock throne this time around, CIA created, organized, trained and assisted SAVAT. The body count run up by SAVAT, the Shah, Diem and Armas exceeds the Auschwitz total. Ike was not about to allow the election of an anti-American president in Vietnam, and, in a fair election, there was no question Ho would have won. By '56, the Vietnamese people hated the US as much as they hated Diem, and with good reason. Jack Kennedy saw the light. In '63, he asked CIA if a coup in Vietnam was feasible. CIA said yes, but only if Diem and his brother were murdered. On November 2, 1963, Diem was assassinated by a CIA hit team. In an ironic twist of fate, Kennedy went to Dallas 20 days later. (Of course, Diem was replaced by a series of clones who were as bad or worse than he had been, but all were kept in place by US might.) LBJ took over and things really went to hell. Nixon won his "Peace with Honor" and retreated. The peace insured that the Geneva commitments of '54 would never be kept. Promises were made by Nixon and repeated by Ford that if the North moved in, the US would return. The "North" moved - with at least half of their force being composed of freedom fighters from the South and the US promptly reneged on those promises. Such is 'Honor'. Two decades and a couple of million lives too late, Vietnam was reunified. The only Dominoes that fell were pretty much the ones that CIA pushed over. During the '50s and 60's, the US backed assassinations and coups in dozens of countries around the world, each time installing pro-American totalitarian dictators at the helm. Most of the dead or deposed were (less than pro-American but certainly not anti-American) reformists who talked of nationalizing industry and regulating wages paid by foreign corporations to the local peasantry. They wanted a fair price for their country's national resources so they could blow it on things like hospitals and schools and roads and water supplies and agriculture and foolishness like that. The Dulles boys (Allen and John Foster) had too much invested in things like United Fruit to let that happen, and they had the seats of power (State Department and CIA) to stop it. A (very) few of the puppets installed by the US and CIA during the Domino Glory Days are Papa Doc Duvalier, Baby Doc, Saddam Hussein, Rafael Trujillo (who they later killed), Castelo Brancho, Suharto, the Greek Junta, Mobuto Seko, Dan Mitrione (he wasn't in power, he just ran the Uruguayan torture and death squads), Augusto Pinochet, Jose Napoleon Duarte, and Ferdinand Marcos. Then there were the neat little groups like UNITOS, the Black Hand, the Brigada Blanca, Battalion 316 and Battalion 319. After they killed Patrice Lumumba, CIA couldn't put their boy in power so 4 years of civil war destroyed the Congo. Much the same happened in Angola. The missed hits on Castro and the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion (which CIA's own estimates projected would likely fail -but they went ahead anyway) coupled with the missiles parked in Turkey and aimed at Moscow led directly to the Missile Crisis. When CIA toppled the Greek government of reformist George Papandreous, LBJ told him "(ph)uck your parliament and your constitution". The CIA coup against Sihanouk led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the death of as much as 25% of the Cambodian population. After 15 failed attempts in Laos between '57 and '75, CIA tried to take over with a surrogate army. That failed, so we bombed, rendering 25% of the population homeless and killing at least a million civilians. There was a lot more going on, but you wanted "short". It all explains what Nam was really about. Nam cannot be understood in a vacuum. It was not an isolated event. It was a small part of US foreign policy and has to be examined in that context. Those of us who did in the 60's hit the streets. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are amongst our more recent creations. They were our bosom buddies while they did our bidding and they got ticked off when we stabbed them in the back. They used some of the billions of dollars worth of weapons and training we gave them and aimed it at us. Why was anyone surprised. Hold the thumbs down. This is all backed by CIA and US government documentation, available to you on-line if you're interested (and how could you not be?)
4. 1. Cold War 2. US afraid of a repeat of Korean War 3. US thought French screwed up Vietnam 4. USSR "comintern" goal of exporting revolution 5. Chinese memory of USA backing Chang Kai Shek