Customer Reviews

Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict

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Michael Lind has for a long time been one of my favorite writers (for two of his best see The Next American Nation and Up from Conservatism). The Necessary War is thought-provoking and very entertaining. Lind corrects some commonly held myths and blasts pro-Ho Chi Minh apologists like David Halberstam.I highly recommend this book.

Having said that, I don't agree with Lind's conclusion. His basic premise is that the war was unwinnable, but that it had to be fought for American credibility. I don't think you should fight wars and expend blood for something as abstract as credibility. Nor do I believe wars should be fought unless they can be won. Lind says 20,000 casualties would have been acceptable to keep American prestige high in our allies' eyes. I would not have spent one American life in Vietnam.

Michael Lind would seem like an unusual person to reinterpret the titanic struggle over Vietnam. He is a writer, poet and left-of-center journalist who feels that despite the enormous cost in lives and material and the deep flaws in American policy, the war still served a purpose. Lind views the war as part of the Cold War and feels that we were sure to lose some battles in the fifty-year campaign to contain Communism. He divides the war into two distinct phases, an overwhelmingly guerilla insurgency in the years before 1968's Tet Offensive, and a more conventional, territorial land war that began after Tet. Lind believes that the strategy employed in the first phase was horribly misguided, and that afterwards, Congress and the American people had lost faith in the entire sorry affair. The Necessary War is a well-argues polemic that challenges conventional wisdom.

Lee Kuan Yew (the George Washington of Singapore and one of Asia's senior statesmen) has stated over and over again that America's involvement in Vietnam was a noble cause. So did Ronald Reagan. So does the author, and he documents why. Nice to see the truth told for a change. I spent a year there (June 1968 to June 1969) and agree 100% with the author's very persuasive history and logic.

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.

Michael Lind has to be either the leading American intellectual alive or, a close competitor for that honor. With this lucid book, I was more than persuaded - indeed swept - into giving credence to Lind's arguments about the importance of the American involvement in Vietnam. Mr Lind draws from many sources in order to bolster his artfully weaved thesis. This book has history, analysis, and even some conjectures that are highly plausible. I am sure this book will become the standard against which similar books will be compared. In case that you are curious, here is Lind's verdict: "The Vietnam War was a just, constitutional and necessary proxy war in the Third World War that was waged by methods that were often counterproductive and sometimes arguably immoral. The war had to be fought in order to preserve the military and diplomatic credibility of the United States in the Cold War, ...."

Reading some of the negative reviews of this book has only strengthened, in my mind, my belief in Lind's argument. The people who dislike it dismiss it as saying that it is defending the indefensible, or excusing America's Cold War policy, etc., etc.

What many of them don't deal with is Lind's well-written defense of America's Cold War policy - that stopping the spread of totalitarian communism was more important than only supporting democratic regimes.

Lind succeeds not only in providing a justification for Vietnam and the level to which America intervened, but in providing (in my mind) startling revelations about Bobby Kennedy and in making a sound case that Johnson was a better CinC than Nixon.

The book also contains fascinating information on the history of the anti-war movement in the United States.

For realists, this book presents arguments that simply must be dealt with.

Initially I liked this book because it does have some different viewpoints from the standard anti-American liberal take on the Vietnam War. But I really disagree with the premise that the war had to be fought to maintain American prestige. If we had never gone to Vietnam in the first place there would have been no need to save face. It is simple as that.

I also disagree with the premise that we could not have won the war. I am no expert, but I think we lost the Vietnam war because of the manner in which the liberal idiot LBJ decided to fight the war. I also think that when you go to war for the wrong reasons, which LBJ and JFK both did, you will have a much harder time winning because your strategy will be determined by the wrong reasons and as a leader you will make the wrong decisions.

I understand LBJ did not want to bring China into the war like what happened in the Korean War. But that did not mean that he had to fight the war the way he did.

We should have gone to WIN and hand a crushing defeat to the communists or not at all.

Lind is a provocative, engaging, and also infuriating writer. In this book on the American experience in Vietnam, he offers up a new take strategy and the balance of power in the Cold War that is extremely different. The United States had to fight in Vietnam and lose (although winning would have been preferable) to prove that its word had meaning and that the allies could count on their American friends. "It was necessary for the United States to escalate the war in the mid-1960s in order to defend the credibility of the United States as a superpower, but it was necessary for United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts. Indochina was worth a war but only a limited war--and not the limited war that the United States actually fought" (p. xv).

At times the book reads like it was designed for domestic political consumption and winning points on one of the cable talk shows that are broadcast from various parts of the Washington, D.C. area. It is far more sophisticated than what anyone will find on those shows, though.

Lind basically calls it like he sees it and manages to rankle almost anyone who has a stake in American public life: Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, the religious, the military, the antiwar movement and pacifists, the American intellectual community, and the civil rights movement to name just a few. Those few groups that do not get offended in some form from this book are probably not all that important in the first place. In the process, he punctures many myths. Chapter three on the failure of the U.S. military in Vietnam--rejecting the idea popular among veterans that the politicians kept them from winning the war--alone is worth the price of the book. He also goes after the antiwar movement and argues in convincing fashion that it became the witting pawn of the North Vietnamese and that many of the leaders crossed the line between dissent and disloyalty. The chapter on American politics and culture is interesting, but he makes the United States far more historical conscious than is actually the case. It is also difficult to take serious an argument that claims Wisconsin and Oregon are part of New England. Few people will buy all his arguments, but he will make you stop and think a bit.

Michael Lind's overview of the Vietnam war is a sober, thoughtful, apparently unbiased analysis of the policies and strategies of America's most divisive conflict. His basic conclusion is that the war was a necessary battle (ending in a Soviet victory) in the larger cold war, and this is appropriate. Most of his other conclusions are reasonable. He is particularly hard on the antiwar movement, including Robert Kennedy and other liberal icons, while he often praises Johnson and Nixon. The book does have a few weak parts. For example, in a post 9/11 world, some of his comments about America's willingness to go to war seem dated. Yet this is an excellent, balanced book.

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.