[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives]
There was opposition to both starting and continuing the Vietnam war that had nothing to do with the self-described “Peace” movement.
Eisenhower, for example, thought we should avoid such conflicts and concentrate only on vital choke points across the world. Eisenhower, like many critics of the initiating and continuing the war, argued from the perspective of a realistic and practical strategy. They did not believe that the war revealed America as evil. That type of opposition to the war did not spring from a delusional narrative but from practical concerns over the best strategy for containing and defeating communism. They believed that America had limited resources and limited political will and that we had to pick our battles.
The “peace” movement, by contrast, did not make practical arguments and they did not believe that communism needed to be contained or defeated. Instead, they based their arguments on the premise that the war resulted from America’s internal corruption and that in essence America was the cause of the conflict. Their goal was to get America to abandon the people of Indochina completely and not to simply reform the way America fought communism there. They argued that the people of Indochina wanted to be communist and that they would be much better off under communist rule. When they did succeed in bringing about the abandonment, they cheered the fall of the non-communists.
I’m not entirely sure how a near decade long mass movement starts, grows, and triumphs without ever laying out its program. In fact, I’m fairly sure that it can’t. That would imply that practical solutions to the problem of communist aggression were never part of the US peace movement.