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Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (v. 1)

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"If you do nothing enough, something's bound to happen" - Benjamin Daniel Katz

In his new book, Triumph Forsaken, Mark Moyar refers to this interpretation of Vietnam as the "orthodox" school of thought. So entrenched is this orthodox interpretation that its proponents consider axiomatic their premise that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was at best a lapse in judgment, at worst a criminal enterprise, and in any case a tragic mistake. The "revisionist" school, a growing insurgency in military history that Moyar explicitly represents, sees Vietnam as "a worthy but improperly executed enterprise."

Moyar's focus is on the formative years of the conflict, before the major commitment of U.S. combat forces in 1965. He considers the key assertions that undergird the orthodox interpretation of events, and shows their weaknesses, if not outright inaccuracies. The story focuses on Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam, who came to power (as prime minister) in 1954. The U.S.-backed 1963 coup that resulted in Diem's death was by most accounts the watershed event in the history of the war; it led inexorably to the large-scale commitment of U.S. ground forces two years later.

The orthodox histories present Diem as a clueless tyrant who was losing control of the country -- as a Catholic aloofly ruling a land of Buddhists, influenced by the Marie Antoinette-like attitude of his sister-in-law Madame Nhu. Moyar convincingly argues that this depiction of Diem is false, the product of U.S. press bias and the cultural illiteracy of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Diem was in no wise an ineffectual leader. Unlike those who followed him, he was able to make order. Diem neutralized the vast organized-crime empires that initially threatened his authority. He kept a lid on the militant Buddhist movement that was in league with the North. Moreover, with the help of U.S. advisers -- including former OSS operative Edward Lansdale and Lt. Gen. Samuel "Hanging Sam" Williams -- he was able to mount an effective campaign to diminish the influence of the Communists in the South. Internal Communist-party documents from the North show that the party suffered massive defections and defeats in the late 1950s, in some areas losing 90 percent of its cadres. Diem's success was no secret; in 1959 the New York Times dubbed his rule since 1954 "a five-year miracle."

By then Diem was at his zenith. In 1960 Ho Chi Minh, frustrated at the failure of the party to foment an uprising in the South, declared a renewed armed struggle and began dispatching waves of soldiers and supplies southward. Diem's internal opponents were given new confidence. When Lodge arrived, he took an instant dislike to Diem, primarily because Lodge thought he knew better how to run South Vietnam, and Diem had the temerity to think otherwise. The U.S. pushed Diem to make conciliatory gestures to various protest groups, particularly the Buddhists, which played into the hands of the Communists. A noteworthy State Department cable from this period observed that one of Diem's concessions "appears to have had no effect on militants." In fact, Diem's U.S.-mandated acts of conciliation had emboldened his enemies, since they read compromise as weakness. This contributed to the self-reinforcing story line that led to the coup -- fear of losing control of the situation in South Vietnam on the part of those who did not know how to keep order led them to hobble the one man who did. Increasing disorder fed Lodge's propensity to micromanage, which stiffened Diem's resistance. He was finally removed for not being the puppet ruler his adversaries accused him of being.
One very effective enemy psychological operation was the use of Buddhist demonstrators. Diem, a Catholic, was charged with oppressing the more numerous Buddhists. Moreover, with their exotic robes and regalia the Buddhists were well suited to garnering the attentions of the press. They presented an attractive story line, one that played to the American sense of religious freedom and fair play. For example, when Diem sought to close some Buddhist pagodas that had become subversive headquarters, it raised the same kinds of concerns one hears when contemporary authorities scrutinize the similar abuse of mosques.

The Buddhists were portrayed as well-intentioned reformers with no ties to the Communists, a notion central to the orthodox critique of Diem; but the most important of the militant Buddhist leaders, Tri Quang, was the brother of the North Vietnamese Communist official in charge of subversion in the South. Many of the protesters were Communist provocateurs who had simply shaved their heads and donned saffron robes.

A key contributor to the downfall of the regime was anti-Diem press coverage, the type written by Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, and Neil Sheehan, among others. One might think that reporters who spent their time covering a country from the inside might be counted on to offer significant insights, but a congressional fact-finding mission in 1963 found the in-country American reporters to be "arrogant, emotional, unobjective, and ill-informed." Karnow, Halberstam, and Sheehan all relied a great deal on a Vietnamese journalist named Pham Xuan An, a stringer for Reuters. He helped the journalists interpret political events, always in a light unfavorable to Diem. The Americans did not know that Pham was a Communist agent who had been instructed by the party to become a journalist in order to influence Western media views of Vietnam. (Today, many news services rely on Iraqi stringers, and it is common practice for insurgents and their sympathizers to produce staged videos and concoct anti-Coalition stories to feed to the credulous Westerners. One example is Bilal Hussein, an AP photographer who is said to have strong insurgent ties and was taken into custody in a terrorist safe house.)

Moyar is sympathetic to President Kennedy, downplaying his desire for and knowledge of the coup, and placing most of the blame on Lodge, who was pursuing a private vendetta. The coup was generally hailed by the liberal establishment: The New York Times called it "inevitable . . . and highly desirable." But Moyar argues (and even some orthodox historians agree) that the coup was a momentous blunder. It ushered in a series of weak governments, which in turn emboldened Hanoi to make a major push toward victory. Moyar takes effective aim at the orthodox argument that the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident was engineered by Lyndon Johnson as an excuse to pursue escalation in Vietnam. In fact, at the time, LBJ was criticized for not responding vigorously enough, and the first large-scale U.S. combat actions did not take place until the summer of 1965, a year after Tonkin.

Johnson himself said, as early as April 1965, that "our restraint [after the Tonkin Gulf incident] was viewed as weakness; our desire to limit conflict was viewed as prelude to our surrender." But he did not internalize this lesson, and the use of "graduated force" in Vietnam, which was intended to convey U.S. resolve, had the opposite effect. This is a common critique in military circles, credited to Harry Summers. The proper response to provocation is not to dole out force in small doses; rather, it is to employ the traditional American way of war, sudden, unrestrained violence in pursuit of total victory. Where Americans have fought wars that way, we have won. Where we have not, we have lost. The accepted wisdom in the Vietnam period was that had the U.S. extended the ground war to the North (as many military leaders wanted), China would have intervened, leading to a second Korean War. Moyar notes that newly obtained Chinese sources fail to support this notion. One might add that the "Second Korean War" scenario looks pretty good compared with what actually happened, since in Korea we suffered two-thirds the casualties of Vietnam (killed and wounded), and we maintained the South's freedom.

Throughout the book Moyar takes up the contentions that form the bulwark of the orthodox interpretation. Would JFK have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived? No, if anything he would have escalated the American commitment. Was Ho Chi Minh just a nationalist leader seeking the peaceful reunification of his country? No, he was a hard-core Leninist who sought to extend his rule as far as it would go, whether the people he ruled wanted it or not. The book is meticulously documented; it draws on the substantial U.S. documentary record of the war, bringing fresh perspectives to familiar evidence. Moyar augments and supports his analysis with extensive use of North Vietnamese archival material, most of which was unavailable to the orthodox historians of the 1970s and '80s.

In sum, Triumph Forsaken is an important book -- not only as an interpretation of the Vietnam War, but also as a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to believe that the culture of the New England town meeting can be easily exported and take root overnight in new soil. The U.S. tried to force too much, too fast, on South Vietnam. We wanted American-style democracy to flourish in a culture that could not sustain it; we wanted a free and independent South Vietnamese government that would do what it was told. By 1965 we had taken full ownership of a wrecked system, prompting President Johnson to complain: "I can't get out. I can't finish it with what I have got. And I don't know what the hell to do!"

I read Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken with full admiration. As an avid
reader of Vietnam war history --in both in Vietnamese and in English --it's delightful to see Mr. Moyar comes up with a fresh look at, among
others, what we Sough Vietnamese consider the most turbulent times of the
Republic of Vietnam . Aside from the book's main theme which advances
the premise that triumphs achieved by South Vietnam's first republic
were forsaken and the removal of President Ngo Dinh Diem was a mortal
mistake, Triumph Forsaken also provides a detailed picture of a rather
complex and chaotic times in South Vietnam .
The immediate four years after the coup d'R(tm)etat that brought down Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in 1963 were tumultuous ones. The situation during
the period of 1964-1967 in Saigon had been discussed and written in many
books before, but none provided as much details as Mr. Moyar's. What
makes Mr. Moyar'book different from other books is that the author
abundantly supplies readers with references from books published in
Vietnamese from both sides of the war (North and South Vietnam ). This reader must admid that many times during reading Mr. Moyar'R(tm)s book, he has gone to his bookshelves to checked out those Vietnamese sources cited by the author. And on every instance the references are relevant and concise; translations from the Vietnamese sources are splendid as they were rendered into English.
Two chapters stands out from Triumph Forsaken: Chapter 16 (The Prize for
Victory: January-May 1965), and Chapter 17 (Decision: June-July 1965). The
periods described in those two chapters were the times when political and
military situations in South Vietnam were at their worst: in the home front,infighting between South Vietnamese rival generals for political control reached its apex. In the battle front, North Vietnamese military commanders began to test to see if they could employ big unit operations. And with the capability to wage regimental-sized battles they could. It's from these vicious and big battles of Binh Gia, Dong Xoai and Ba Gia in 1965, where the South Vietnamese ilitary suffered bad beatings, that the United Stated decided to send in the ground (combat) troops to stem the tide. In addition to many recently declassified documents used to prove the author's point, for a better comparison, Mr. Moyar also provides
plenty of sources and references from contemporary North and South
Vietnamese military books and memoirs. And that makes the book interesting.
Lastly, this may be aside from the focus of this review, but as a Vietnamese reader I can not fail to praise Mr. Moyar for his scholarship and his keen eyes for editing this Vietnamese-ladden book: of the 415 pages of text and 93 pages of references and index, sprinkled with Vietnamese names and Vietnamese titles, there were only five typos. Now, that's a remarkable achievement for a young Vietnam war historian. Triumph Forsaken is a must read for those who care to read Vietnam war literature. Read not one time, but a few times over.

Triumph Forsaken is the finest account published to date on the Vietnam War. The early histories of the War were produced by the journalists who covered the War. Their accounts reflect negative reporting, as well as the search for "Dirt" as Neil Sheehan called it. Thereafter followed histories of the War based on the negative journalism that characterized media coverage from the War Zone.

In the years that followed primary sources have been produced that include biographical accounts -- first person accounts of the diplomats, intelligence operatives, and soldiers who experienced the War first hand. Particularly useful have been the official military histories produces long after the guns were silent that record the message traffic, major speeches of key leaders, and intelligence summaries of the campaigns waged by both Hanoi and America. Finally there are the biographical accounts of the North Vietnamese Generals, who directed the War from Hanoi and fought the War in South Vietnam. Their accounts add much to our understanding of the War and in many respects show a remarkable similarity to the accounts of Senior American Diplomats and General Officers of the battles they waged from opposite sides of the skirmish lines.

It is these primary sources that Mark Moyar has used to write his fresh and very readable History of the Vietnam War. Such a work could not have been written twenty years ago, because the primary sources were still in production. Now that these sources have been published, it is possible for the first time to see the War as senior leaders on both sides saw the Conflict. Moyar's account is fascinating. It bring both new light to the events of the War, as well as it brings new analysis never before seen to evaluate the significance of the Vietnam experience and the meaning of the vast treasure, both human and military, that both sides poured into the War effort to shape our times. Serious students of the Vietnamese War, or the American War, as it in known in Hanoi, will not want to miss the seminal publication.

Published by Cambridge University Press and 512 pages in length, Triumph Forsaken is the finest work yet to emerge from among the many works covering the War. Covering the years from 1954 to 1965, the History will be followed by a follow-on edition covering the years from 1965 to 1975 that will provide new light on the final decade of the War based upon recently published primary sources. The reader who brings an open mind and willingness to hear the words of those who led the War will be rewarded many times over for the time spent engrossed in a beautifully written account of the most important war fought since the end of the Second World War.

TRIUMPH is the first objective detailed history I have read concerning our involvement in Vietnam. I worked next to the highest levels of military intelligence in Vietnam and, I can assure you, Mark Moyar leaves no stone unturned in assessing our buildup and eventual troop introduction into that country--with all the blunders and mis-steps along the way--but ultimately reflects the justification of our strategic goals in Southeast Asia. All Vietnam veterans and their families will read this book with pride. This book and its sequel will someday be mandatory reading for all history courses covering this time period.

It is certainly about time that a scholar trained in historical research takes a new look at the Vietnam War era and evaluates it on the basis of the wealth of new evidence which has become available. This new book by Dr. Mark Moyar, "Triumph Forsaken," offers a serious challenge to those of the so-called "orthodox school" of historians and commentators regarding the War itself, its justification, and its consequences. Self-described as a "revisionist" historian, Moyar provides a reassessment of the events from America's first intrusion into the Vietnam arena (mainly in the form of "advisors"), through the fateful assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, to the placement of U.S. ground forces into Vietnam by President Lyndon Johnson.

For the record, I am not in either the "orthodox" or the "revisionist" camp of historians; I am solidly in the "let's find the truth" and the "objective evidence" camp. Furthermore, I am not a member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that the "Publishers Weekly" mentions in its review ("Revisionists will embrace the book; the orthodox will see it as more evidence of a vast, right-wing conspiracy"). The facts of the matter are that I remember well the Vietnam War, lost my closest childhood friend -- a Navy pilot -- when he was shot down over Vietnam (how well I remember the dreaded telephone call that night from my parents!), and can recall exactly where and when I received the news about Diem's assassination in November of 1963 (and remarked angrily to one of my colleagues, "Well, we have just lost South Vietnam to the Communists"). I was teaching an American history course at the time and, although I was lecturing on the American War for Independence, I followed on a daily basis all the events in Southeast Asia as they were unfolding.

Moyar's book, therefore, has great meaning for me personally since I lived through the era he covers and had strong opinions about what was going on in the world at that time. Much of what Moyar discloses some forty or so years later, many of us suspected at the time (that is, those who didn't agree with our government's strategy vis-a-vis Vietnam, took seriously the matter of international Communism on the move, and didn't swallow everything the media and its correspondents were telling the American people). The merciless killing of President Diem was especially appalling to us and we "knew" that some members of the Kennedy administration had to be involved. Moyar provides much rich detail and background about this incident, which, in my view, was the most significant disaster of the period, and he furnishes evidence that shows, in my opinion, that all too frequently in American foreign policy "politics" trumps "good sense."

It is interesting to note the following which is related by Moyar: "The Communists, unlike most of the Americans, were very quick to grasp the profound significance of the November 1963 coup. Upon hearing of Diem's assassination, Ho Chi Minh remarked, 'I can scarcely believe that the Americans would be so stupid.'" Well, I have to take issue with Ho Chi Minh's remark. I have no problem whatsoever believing that our government can be that stupid. It has shown it time and time again and continues to show it, for instance, in the planning and execution of the war resulting in the current Iraq fiasco. (Two years ago I wrote that "Iraq may well become George Bush's Vietnam." I was laughed at by a few colleagues. Who's laughing now?)

Many U.S. government officials involved in the Vietnam situation are justly criticized by Moyar, particularly American Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, which is no surprise to me. Lodge seemed more concerned with his potential candidacy as the Republican nominee for president than with the future of Vietnam and the menace of Asian communism. Lodge probably could have prevented the Diem assassination but chose not to do so which, in my view, makes him implicit in the coup. Furthermore, according to Moyar, Ambassador Lodge "relied very heavily on U.S. newspaper correspondents for information. The assessments that he telegraphed to Washington much more closely resembled the assessments of the press than they did the assessments of the American military and the CIA...." Ah, yes, the American press. One does have to confront the issue of the influence of reporters and correspondents on foreign policy. And Moyar does so at many points throughout the book.

Consider just one of the incidents narrated by the author. On February 27, 1962, Diem's palace was attacked by two of his own pilots. One was shot down and fell into the Saigon River, was rescued by the police and taken into custody. The bombing raid was not part of any military plan. The captured pilot, however, "confessed that he had expected U.S. support for overthrowing the government as the result of reading articles in 'Newsweek' and 'Time'." There was a constant battle between the South Vietnamese government and some of the American press and one could interpret the behavior and writings of certain reporters as actually helping to determine American foreign policy, a situation that historically results in the making of bad policy. (As obvious examples, I simply point to some irresponsible reporters who "covered" the American Civil War or the Spanish-American War and through their inaccurate and biased -- but highly influential -- reporting inflamed public opinion and impacted governmental policies.)

At least two reporters in Vietnam are singled out for special criticism by Moyar: David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. As well they should be. In too many cases to cite here, their reporting was anything but "objective" and "unbiased." It is interesting to note that the "Publishers Weekly" review commented on this by stating: "Though Moyar marshals many primary sources to buttress his political point of view, he undermines his argument by disparaging those he disagrees with (calling Sheehan and Halberstam, for example, 'indignant,' 'vengeful,' and 'self-righteous')." And one has to wonder in what way Moyar's argument is undermined by these "disparaging" words if, in fact, those are exactly the words which describe the behavior of those named reporters? Me thinketh that publication protesteth too much. Of course, its constituency includes the journalism crowd.

Vietnam is still a disaster which haunts the American psyche. We lost a lot of good Americans on that battlefield and we have, in my opinion, failed to learn the real lessons of that debacle. Moyar gives us much to ponder over; his book is replete with details; his prose illustrations are vivid and on the mark. The serious reader will find "Triumph Forsaken" a valuable contribution to military history. Highly recommended.

Mr. Moyar provides proof positive that perspective often brings frigtening clarity. Previous treatises on the Vietnam conflict have focused upon the final years of US involvement. Few works have provided the necessary historical context as well as a sharp, critical analysis of our strategy. The detailed references and superb sourcing reinforce what many scholars have been talking about around the edges of this time frame. That the conflict was ours to lose is now no longer even remotely doubtful. Serious students of military and political history would do well to take up this tome to refine their perspective of the second most socially / culturally defining conflict of the 20th century, the first being WWII.

Of all the books I've read this past year, Mark Moyar's book Triumph Forsaken has to be the most intriguing. His insistence on a major reassessment of the Vietnam War is compelling enough that it motivates you to collect all those assumptions you may have had about the war and reconsider them, one by one. The reverse spin Moyar puts on the received wisdom about the war, especially that which has been disseminated by a few prominent American journalists over the last 40 years, is formidable to say the least. From a pure foreign policy and military strategy perspective, the book is a valuable contribution to the field of Vietnam War research.

In the book's preface, Moyar sets out the main argument that Ngo Dinh Diem and his administration were unreservedly the correct fit for the fledgling Republic of Vietnam that had arisen from the 1954 Geneva Accords. He contends that no one else in South Vietnamese politics demanded the same respect and possessed the innate leadership qualities as Diem. Moyar attempts to demonstrate that three main forces colluded to have Diem deposed, which ended up with his assassination in November 1963: militant Buddhists, liberal-leaning American news media and then US Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.

According to Moyar's historical accounts based on select source documents, a strong militant Buddhist contingent, led by Tri Quang, effectively manipulated American public opinion against Diem and his government through the use of particularly opinionated American journalists living in Saigon. The book insinuates that either communist agents were infiltrating and manipulating the outspoken Buddhist movement or both groups colluded with each other in order to bring down Diem. Moyar holds a clear distaste for The New York Times, especially David Halberstam ("...he would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history"), whom he accuses of reporting disinformation about the Diem regime that effectively planted the seed of distrust for Diem in American public opinion. On the diplomatic side, Moyar holds Henry Cabot Lodge personally responsible for allowing the assassination of Diem to occur presumably because Lodge disliked the man's antidemocratic, uniquely Vietnamese, approach to governance.

Diem's forced downfall inevitably led to the irreparable destabilization of South Vietnam, especially on the counterinsurgency front, for the rest of the war effort. In turn, a seemingly endless series of military juntas were to rule the country and they exhibited neither the talent nor the inclination to successfully run a nation, let alone defeat a voracious communist insurgency.

Interestingly, the book espouses the merits of the "domino" theory in helping to explain America's subsequent intervention in South Vietnam's political affairs and expansion of the war on the Indochinese peninsula. Moyar argues that due to China's vast influence over the Asian continent at the time when communist insurgencies were blooming like wildflowers all over region, even in such stalwart U.S. allies as India and Thailand, the U.S. was obligated to step in and contain the spread of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore, in the eyes of many domino theorists Vietnam became both the lynchpin of American military power and litmus test of U.S. influence upon the world.

To this end, Moyar supports the Joint Chiefs of Staff's contention that the war in Vietnam should have been prosecuted using overwhelming force instead of a "limited war", which Robert McNamara and his subordinates recommended to both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In their viewpoint, victory could have been had if enough ground troops had been sent to seal off South Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia, and at the 17th parallel between the two Vietnams, as well as conduct heavy aerial bombardment of the North.

Anatoliy Aleksandrovich Danilov, a Soviet official in London, confided to an American that the United States "should increase its force by five divisions in Vietnam, seal off the 17th Parallel, cut off the Viet Cong from their northern logistics, then ignore the North and wait for Viet Cong to come to terms because they are `starved' by lack of Northern support." (p. 360)

According to Moyar, the "limited war" strategy advocated by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations only emboldened the North Vietnamese communists to attack South Vietnam even harder, until the Johnson administration relented in deploying thousands of American troops to South Vietnam in 1965.

Taken as a whole, Triumph Forsaken is a detailed rumination on how the South Vietnamese could have won the war against the North with significant U.S. assistance. That is, if the American government had shown patience and understanding toward Diem and had not tried to rigidly enforce American democratic principles upon the Vietnamese.

Moyar's point of view is reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's unapologetic realpolitik. Kissinger was Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor and then Gerald Ford's Secretary of State toward the end of the Vietnam War. The main concern of realpolitik was the furtherance and protection of America's political and economic interests around the world. One could argue that its only concern was with being on the "right" side of history when it came to the epic struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Let's imagine for a moment that U.S. foreign policy and military support were as decisive in either Vietnam or Cambodia as it had been in Latin America during the Cold War. Just as in countries like Nicaragua, Panama and Chile, American funds, military expertise and armaments could have propped up right wing, anticommunist dictatorships in Southeast Asia that only decades later would have been accused of atrocities, all in the name of stamping out communism.

Regardless of my moralistic aside, Triumph Forsaken is well worth reading in order to see the flipside of history and to broaden the discussion of the Vietnam War.

It's every bit as good as the Wall Street Journal says it is. One additional thing worth noting is that the book is based on far more communist sources than any previous account, which for the first time lets us properly answer questions such as what would have happened if we had cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and why did Hanoi send conventional forces into the south at the end of 1964. The author meticulously tears apart the old arguments and provides new arguments that are backed by a vast stockpile of facts. Bookview has another quite good review of the book.

This book is the best book I have read about the Vietnam War. My father and his friends spoke several times of Diems ruling days, and often praised his leadership. In their eyes - they who lived and fought in the country during the entire war - it is the Orthodox American historians who are revisionist.

This book is well argumented, written and researched. Moyar explains that Diem was a pragmatic and capable wise leader who was respected and had the ability to carry out orders in a time of chaos. He also thoroughly revise the myths of the buddhist repression, military inefficiency and the supposed low public and administrative support of the Diem government.

Triumph Forsaken is more deeply researched and more perceptive than any other history of the Vietnam War that I have seen and, trust me, I've read a good chunk of them. So much has been written and re-written about the Vietnam War that it would seem impossible to produce a book that thoroughly discredits most of the conventional wisdom, but Triumph Forsaken does just that and does it splendidly. It is well-documented proof that the left has totally dominated the previous discussion on Vietnam and that it has grossly distorted reality for its own purposes. This is not to say that the book is a polemic. Far from it, as a matter of fact. As much as is possible with a book of such controversial nature, it takes a detached view of the participants on all sides and does not get bogged down in the emotional diatribes that so often mar true objectivity. Rather than focusing strictly on the Americans with occasional reference to the North Vietnamese, as so many books do, it gives great attention to the Vietnamese leaders on all sides, as well as to other foreign leaders whose views on Vietnam made the country an area of vital strategic importance. This book will go where it doubtlessly belongs: into the canon of our must-read history books.