I like your analogy, and would agree 100% if the premise of the war were true. It wasn't.

The US did not recognize Vietnam was a civil war, preferring to sell it to the world as an expansion of communist influence. The Vietnamese had been fighting foreign influence for centuries, including the Chinese, then the French, then the French financed by America, and then the Americans.

Long before communism came along as an ideology, Vietnam had been fighting to get foreigners out of the country.

Had it been a war of the expansion of communist influence, there may have been a valid reason for it. It became obvious, though the American media was afraid to acknowledge it, that this was a war which started trying to get rid of the French, then to unite the country following an artificial division.

By the way, the elections which were scheduled for the entire country as part of the French armistice were sabotaged by the South and the Americans because they knew the North would win, according to Barbara Tuchman, in "The March of Folly".

The "domino" effect wasn't real, and neither was the Gulf of Tonkin, the Vietnamese WMDs. And it was another tragic case of the politicians believing their own propaganda.

It was political pride, the fact that neither Johnson nor Nixon wanted to be accused of losing a war. I don't believe that's a good reason for a war, to be honest with you. Neither Johnson nor Nixon were worth it, and neither were their Presidencies.

Arf