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Title: Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict by Michael Lind ISBN: 0-684-87027-4 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.68 (37 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Reinterpreting Viet Nam
Comment: The VietNam War gets much ink spilled in hopes of explaining what happened between the years 1960-75. This is an attempt by a self-described "liberal anti-communist" to explain how the Viet Nam War was lost, and by whom. It's a pretty cogent argument, with only a flaw here and there, generally well-reasoned and thought out.
Lind doesn't want to discuss the war in detail, and that's one of the problems of the book. He stays focused on strategy and big-picture things, paying attention to all of the 20th century battles of the Cold War, and battles since. I found it a bit annoying that he places most of the blame for the defeat in Viet Nam at the feet of the military, but other than some vague platitudes about fighting the wrong war, he has little to say by way of explanation of what they did wrong.
Instead, weirdly, the book turns out to be a defense of Lyndon Johnson. Lind finds Johnson almost completely blameless, and thinks him rather skilled as a politician and a war leader. He has many biting and incisive opinions on other principals of the war and critics of the operations there. He takes shots at pretty much everyone who has written about the war before him, from Noam Chomsky to Robert MacNamara to Barbara Tuchman, and has little good to say about anyone else at all.
Given all of this, this is still a worthwhile book. The author has clearly thought all of this through, and his arguments, if a bit much at times, are well-thought out and reasoned.
Rating: 3
Summary: Credibility Calculus
Comment: As a child, watching reports of the Vietnam War on TV, I was puzzled. I had seen movies and read books about World War II, in which American and Russsian forces pushed straight to Berlin to cut off the enemy's head. Why weren't we doing that now? Where was the push to Hanoi? The adults patted my little head. It's not that simple, Timmy. We don't want to take Hanoi. We just want to change their behavior. If we bomb them, but refrain from taking control of their country, they'll realize we mean well and they'll change their behavior.
Now comes Michael Lind to pat the heads of all who would question the Best and the Brightest's most famous and ghastly fiasco. The dust jacket touts his demolishing of "the stale orthodoxies of the left and the right". The first stale orthodoxy to be demolished is the idea that we should not have have gone in the first place. Hence the title: Necessary War. Lind's view is that it was a proxy battle in the Cold War. Nothing new in that, but it does come as news to me that the reason for Vietnam was to demonstrate our "credibility as a military superpower". Not only did this flimsy reason suffice for war, according to the author, but to achieve this credibility it was "not necessary for the United States to win the Vietnam War".
I had to reread this section several times to be sure I hadn't misconstrued his meaning or come across an editing lapse. No, it was really there: the reason to go to war in Vietnam was to Demonstrate our Credibility. We didn't really have to win, or even stay very long. How long? Lind doesn't measure it in months or years. He measures it in lives. This calculation, which befouls page 79, asserts: "Washington should have imposed an informal limit on the number of American lives it was willing to spend". It "ended up spending nearly sixty thousand lives" when, according to Lind, it could only "afford to lose 15,000-20,000 soldiers...before the public turned against it." You don't need to win to retain credibility and prestige, just "spend" 20,000 lives (excluding the 900,000 Vietnamese--they don't count), cut your losses, and split.
Perhaps growing up in the computer age has caused Lind to confuse war with a video game. I certainly hope I'm not the first to point out that American lives, nor Vietnamese lives, are not chips to be spent by him and the other senior fellows in Washington on some nebulous product called American Prestige or American Credibility. Of course, such callous speculation is not new or fresh. The monocled, frock-coated diplomats of the first World War sent millions to the slaughter for...what was it? French prestige? German credibility? There are many things worth fighting for, but prestige and credibility are not among them.
Lind then moves on to another orthodoxy to demolish, what he pretentiously calls the "praetorian critique". This is the notion, held by the expendable grunts in the military, that they were not allowed to win in Vietnam. He dismisses as "myth" this belief held by "92% of Vietnam veterans polled by the VA", and also by Ronald Reagan. He then ticks off a number of reasons why we couldn't seize Hanoi, which boil down to 1)The Chinese would come 2)The Russians would come. But his main "fresh" contention to demolish the stale praetorian critique is that the war was not winnable because the US military was too inflexible to adapt to a guerilla war. But that's okay because we didn't need to win to demonstrate our credibility, which, you'll remember, was the whole point of the war in the first place.
This line of thinking--we have to go to war to show our credibility, but we can't win the war, but that's okay because we can still show our credibility by losing, and the losing can be blamed on the military, and nobody will mention that civilians control the military--this line of thinking is the very fault line that gave rise to the conservative orogeny which continues to this day, which is not coincidentally a movement grounded in common sense and common decency. Common sense tells you you're not going to be the first military in history to win a war by remaining permanently on the defensive. Common decency dictates that you don't send conscripted boys to be traumatized and maimed and paralyzed and killed unless you have a very good reason. Preservation of Prestige is not such a reason. It's not even close.
Back when I was watching this war on TV it never occurred to me that people in power in America could think this way about their own citizenry. This book shows that people like Michael Lind and Lyndon Johnson who view war as a sort of board game or adjunct to the election process are fairly common.
Rating: 5
Summary: Thank God for the information revolution
Comment: In this most balanced historical rendering of the reasons, causes and effects of the long war in Indochina, Lind provides extensively nuanced opinions and facts. Published in 1999, it has the factual gravitas that goes with being a beneficiary of the West's access to the post-communism Soviet archives, which became available after the fall of the wall and the implosion of its, as Ronald Reagan would accurately say, Marxist-evil empire. These considerable facts reveal the calumny, continuing even today, of the hard left-wing socialist utopians in America to distort the realities of the Indochina war of the 1940's-1970's to the American people in a successful attempt to miss portray the entire Cold War effort, particularly the battle for Vietnam. Lind makes clear how the Communist regime in the USSR (who provided comprehensive air defenses for Hanoi unseen since Nazi Germany's defense of Berlin in WWII), aided by the Communist's in Beijing, (who provided the crucial assistance of +/- 317,000 Maoist Communist soldiers to Ho Chi Minh's Communist thugs, who in turn used them copiously in logistical support efforts for the war), were the difference in stifling America's military intervention which focused on stopping the spread of Communism in the greater southeastern Asian land mass. That the American and European Left not only denied this now overwhelming reality, but successfully portrayed it as a civil war with Ho Chi Minh as merely a "leader of his people", calls them to task for perpetrating a barbarous falsehood for which they've yet to apologize.
Lind illustrates the importance of remembering that this was the first foreign war fought on television, which made it easier for the overwhelmingly Left-wing press in America to mischaracterize the war by engaging in a grossly fraudulent display of the fallacy of inductive logic, where a specific event is elevated to create the misperception that it represents the "whole"; think the Tet offensive in February 1968. Interestingly enough, this same upside-down one-sidedness of the western press is ongoing today in the reporting of the current war in Iraq.
Lind covers in detail the origins of the Cold War (really WW III) where the West, while involved in a siege in Western Europe with the Soviets, was compelled to fight proxy wars in other parts of the world, specifically in the Asian theatre. In fact, Lind breaks the Cold War into two wars separated by the Tet offensive in 1968 and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He remonstrates on Russian adventurisn in Africa, Central America, and Afghanistan in the face of America's lack of resolve to fight the Cold War in foreign lands after Tet.
He also points out that without the loss of China to Maoist Communism we would never have had to face the conflict in Korea or the subsequent one in Indochina. Of note, we still haven't had to lay down American lives to protect Taiwan, but the jury is still out on whether or not the Red Chinese will get crazy enough to start a conflict with us there.
Lind also points out the need to keep weaker more militarily dependent nations on our side by citing a "bandwagon effect" where, like female elephant seals in a harem flock to the newly dominant male who has vanquished the previous alpha-male of the flock. This was on international display in the 1970's. For those who are economically ignorant, there is not enough room here to explain why this is important. If you don't understand it then do your military history homework, something undemanded in academia today.
Lind comments at length on why those in America, both pro and anti-war, seem to be that way due to historical geographical positioning. It's a fascinating discourse and one that by itself makes this a great book. Not only does his commentary dwell on why some go to war while others are restrained, but it also calls into question why those who don't cannot change their minds, even in the face of an overwhelming necessity to pay closer attention. The whole discussion is a paradigm for why all great cultures throughout history have imploded from within due to a moral rot at the core. Sometimes it happens slowly, other times over a much long period, but it always seems to happen. It makes one ponder, what is it in the minds of men...? I'm sure Shakespeare understood this seemingly elusive concept as he seemed to capture about every other theme on human nature that one could imagine.
In the end, Lind makes his case for why Vietnam was a war of necessity for America. Again, this is a wonderfully nuanced book just chock full of interesting facts and insights, but it won't change the minds of those "true believer's" in socialism as the ideal system for operating societies in what we today call western civilization. Indeed, these Marxist-socialist utopians in the west hate capitalism so much that they continue to root against America's capitalist system both domestically and internationally. This is consistent with their opposition against any country abroad (think Israel) that seems to be a successful arm of it. What makes this book a timely read, is the one-sided reporting (the kind that consistently occurred during the Indochina war) of events occurring in Iraq. The marginalization of beheading an American citizen on worldwide television with the fraternity hell-week hazing of Iraqi killers held prisoner in the Abu Ghraib prison (the site of some of Saddam's many brutal torture cells) being just one example. By the same token, the Communist's in Vietnam regularly beheaded village chiefs and their South Vietnamese followers, and then put their heads on pikes in the conquered villages in a successful attempt to intimidate and cow the inhabitants.
For an understanding of why countries go to war in the first place, this is a great and timely book. You won't hear its salient points discussed any where in academia, Hollywood, the major print media, or on the major networks including PBS/NPR, or CNN. If you're a budding intellectual, this is a book for you.
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Title: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley ISBN: 0156013096 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History by B. G. Burkett, Glenna Whitley ISBN: 096670360X Publisher: Verity Press Publishing Inc Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $31.95 |
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Title: America in Vietnam by Guenter Lewy ISBN: 0195027329 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1980 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 by A. A. Fursenko, Aleksandr Fursenko, Timothy J. Naftali ISBN: 0393317900 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Into The Labyrinth: The U.S. and The Middle East 1945-1993 by H.W. Brands ISBN: 0070071888 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages Pub. Date: 01 October, 1993 List Price(USD): $39.40 |
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