Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict [Hardcover]

Michael Lind (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 1999

A quarter century after its end, the Vietnam War still divides Americans. Some, mostly on the left, claim that Indochina was of no strategic value to the United States and was not worth an American war. Others, mostly on the right, argue that timid civilian leaders and defeatists within the media fatally undermined the war effort. These "lessons of Vietnam" have become ingrained in the American consciousness, at the expense of an accurate understanding of the war itself.

In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of America's most disastrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes the stale orthodoxies of the left and the right and puts the Vietnam War in its proper context -- as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War, he argues, was actually the third world war of the twentieth century, and the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan were its major campaigns. Unwilling to engage each other in the heart of Europe, the superpowers played out their contest on the Asian front, while the rest of the world watched to see which side would retreat. As Lind shows, the Soviet Union and Communist China recognized the importance of Vietnam in this struggle and actively supported the North Vietnamese regime from its earliest days, a fact that was not lost on the strategic planners within the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

Lind offers a provocative reassessment of why the United States failed in Vietnam despite the high stakes. The ultimate responsibility for defeat lies not with the civilian policy elite nor with the press but with the military establishment, which failed to adapt to the demands of what before1968 had been largely a guerrilla war. The high costs of the military's misguided approach in American and Vietnamese lives sapped the support of the American people for the U.S. commitment to Indochina. Even worse, the costs of the war undermined American public support for the Cold War on all fronts. Lind masterfully lays bare the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and shows why it broke apart so easily. The consequence of U.S. military failure was thus the forfeiture of Indochina, a resurgence of American isolationism, and a wave of Soviet imperial expansion checked only by the Second Cold War of the 1980s.

"The New York Times" has written of Michael Lind that he "defies the usual political categories of left and right, liberal and conservative." And in an era when the United States so often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts -- in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Iraq -- Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Americans of all political viewpoints.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This original and provocative book is certain to raise emotions. Its justification of America's war in Southeast Asia directly contradicts other recent studies, such as Fredrik Logevall's Choosing War and Robert S. McNamara's Argument Without End. Michael Lind, Washington Editor for Harper's magazine, examines the American military response to North Vietnamese aggression; American credibility during the cold war; domestic politics; and constitutional aspects of the conflict. He places the war's center of gravity in American public opinion rather than in the population of South Vietnam or the North Vietnamese army. In doing so, he can be blunt, as when he claims that members of the Western left who made excuses for the North Vietnamese land-reform terror were "apologists for state-sponsored genocide." One of his conclusions is that if the United States is to continue to be the dominant world power, "then American soldiers must learn to swim in quagmires." Viewing America's Southeast Asian adventure in the context of the cold war, Lind regards it not as a crime, betrayal, or tragic error, but as an unavoidable confrontation. Whether you agree with his arguments, Vietnam: The Necessary War intelligently, often vehemently, challenges preconceptions that surround the most controversial military conflict in American history. --John Stevenson

From Publishers Weekly

In a very opinionated and sharply reasoned attempt to debunk three decades of conventional wisdom about Vietnam, Lind (The Next American Nation), the Washington, D.C., editor of Harper's, attacks both the right-wing contention that the U.S. could have won the war if only the politicians hadn't interfered with the military and the leftist orthodoxy that maintains the U.S. should never have become involved in the first place. Lind treats Vietnam as simply another battle in the Cold War, no different in principle from Korea or Afghanistan or any other Cold War confrontation. As such, it was both necessary and proper to intervene in Vietnam; a failure to do so, he asserts, would have permitted the Soviet Union and China to tighten their grip on the Third World. But once the U.S. committed itself, Lind argues, presidents Johnson and Nixon were obliged to fight a limited war in order to avoid the very real possibility of China entering the fray (just as it had done in Korea). If anything, Lind says, "the Vietnam War was not limited enough." Johnson allowed the U.S. military commanders to wage an expensive war of attrition that killed too many U.S. soldiers too fast and eroded public support for both the conflict in Vietnam and for the Cold War in general. The principal culprits in Lind's analysis are Johnson, General Westmoreland and other U.S. military commanders for their misguided tactics; Nixon, for his quixotic attempt to salvage "peace with honor," during which an additional 24,000 soldiers died needlessly; and the antiwar left, which swallowed much of Ho Chi Minh's propaganda. Lind's arguments, if not always persuasive, are always provocative. His book, with its intelligent analysis of U.S. intervention in Kosovo and other current foreign policy quandaries, is likely to shift the debate on Vietnam and to color future debates about U.S. military intervention abroad. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (October 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684842548
• ISBN-13: 978-0684842547
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #507,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Challenges Stale Assumptions, February 19, 2002

By 

the dirty mac "boot64" (Nutopian Global Institute) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict (Hardcover)

What makes this book stand out from most others on this subject is its viewpoint. Michael Lind writes from the standpoint of liberal anti-Communism or "Cold War liberalism." This proud but now neglected tradition was best embodied by Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. It combined an assertive foreign policy with colorblind civil rights policy and populist economic policy. Tragically, this center-left faction no longer exists as an organized entity in either party, but that's another story.

Lind ruefully notes that a half-baked consensus about Vietnam has found vogue. The U.S. need not have intervened in the first place, but "unlimited" force should have been used against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam once the U.S. did intervene. Liberal isolationists are presumed to have been correct about geopolitical considerations while conservative hawks are presumed to have been correct about military tactics. As Lind demonstrates, both halves of this consensus are misleading:

1) LBJ did not invent America's interest in preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam; it was a commitment dating back to Truman and Eisenhower. Furthermore, it's naive to assume that the U.S. would have suffered little or no damage to its international credibility or security if it allowed South Vietnam to go down the drain without a fight in 1965, especially so close on the heels of the Bay of Pigs and the construction of the Berlin Wall. In fact, the eventual victory of Moscow's North Vietnamese clients did lead to a more aggressive Soviet foreign policy, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

2) LBJ, according to Lind's account, made just one significant stumble, but it was a big one. He should never have given the green light to General Westmoreland's war of attrition. Conventional tactics were an inefficient way to battle the VC, which was waging a mostly guerrilla insurgency in the make-or-break years between 1965 and 1968. The problem was not that Westmoreland was losing the war; the problem was that too many American casualties piled up too quickly. Even after the Tet Offensive, which was a defeat for the VC from a purely military standpoint, the war remained "winnable." But it was being "won" at an obscenely high price, more than the American people could bear.

An alternative was the doctrine of "counter-insurgency" a.k.a. "pacification" or "population security." As Lind explains: "[A] pacification strategy ... would have permitted a more discriminating and less expensive approach to the use of firepower while reducing American losses ... The insurgency would have withered if the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces cut off the recruits and supplies flowing to the Viet Cong from South Vietnam's densely populated coastal rim ..."

Lind does not claim that pacification by itself would have won the war. "[T]he point of pacification would have been to force Hanoi to choose between waging a conventional Korean-type war (in which the U.S. had a comparative advantage) or abandoning its attempt to conquer South Vietnam."

This book has its imperfections. For example, Lind talks from both sides of his mouth regarding America's disengagement from Indochina in 1973-75. "If any Americans deserve a share of the blame for the Khmer Rouge massacres and famine," Lind writes on page 174, "it is anti-war members of Congress ... [who denied] military aid and air support for America's Cambodian allies." Whoa! Lind spends much of the previous 173 pages explaining why the U.S. needed to get out of Indochina after 1968 (to preserve the domestic consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts). Now he chastises Congress for doing exactly that!?! The cutoff of aid to Lon Nol's Cambodian government came more than two years after Nixon and Kissinger signed a treaty that Lind himself calls "a thinly disguised capitulation to Hanoi." Quick fixes were futile by 1975. Recognizing this, Lind writes on page 136: "Even without the congressional cutoff of U.S. military [aid], it seems unlikely that any endgame that did not lead to an indefinite Korean-style commitment of U.S. forces to Indochina probably would have doomed South Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia." Thanks for clearing that up, Mike.

But overall, Michael Lind refreshingly challenges the cliches at both ends of the spectrum that have distorted discussions of the Vietnam War for too long.

32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book that puts the Vietnam conflict in a global context, November 19, 1999

By 

Arthur Larsen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict (Hardcover)

Lind has written a book that takes a look back at the Vietnam conflict as it related to the Cold War and superpower competition in the post-World War II world. There is none of the historical revisionism or disinformation that pervade so many of the books that attempt to label Vietnam as a war that was a civil conflict that should not have been fought by the United States. His reasoning is sound and compelling and cites historical facts. For this veteran, this book has reaffirmed the belief that Vietnam was fought for all the right reasons and contributed to the overall victory of the West that concluded the Cold War a decade ago. The men lost in Vietnam did not die in vain and Lind's book proves that point. Semper Fi.

31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vietnam - The Necessary War, January 1, 2003

By 

Fred Hutchison (Dublin, OH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict (Hardcover)

Book Review: Vietnam the Necessary War, by Michael Lind
C-Span has run and rerun tapes of a live debate (with callers) between Michael Lind, author of Vietnam, the Necessary War and Tim O'Brien author of July, July. Lind, who is defending the purposes behind the war is no conservative war-hawk. He wrote a book about how he has rejected conservatism and adopted a center-left perspective in line with Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. He is a convinced advocate of Truman's policy of containment. He rejects a McArthur style "there is no substitute for victory" and a worldwide fight against Communism. He embraces limited wars as in Korea, Vietnam, and the Afgan vs Soviet war - because in these three cases, the great communist powers of Russia and/or China were actively involved in the war for expansionist objectives. He rejects involvement in Communists insurgencies where Russia and China were not seriously involved or have no strategic interest..
Lind has studied the treasury of documents released by Russia in the nineties which decisively proves that Russia and China were deeply involved in Vietnam from beginning to end. Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, was a member of the Comintern and was co-conspirator with Russia and China from beginning to end. Lind rebukes the war-hawk conservatives who wanted to invade the north. He has found records which reveal Mao Tse Tung's plans to send troops into Vietnam if America invaded the north - just as he sent troops during the Korean War. Lind rebukes the anti-war liberals for undercutting America's purposes in the Vietnam war and contributing to the defeat. He also blames American generals for fighting the war incorrectly and stupidly..
George Kennan crafted the policy of containment during the Truman administration. America and NATO were pledged to contain the expansionist designs of Russia and China by fighting limited proxy wars such as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. The objective was to hold back the tide and buy time until Communism collapsed from its own dead weight - as it did in Russia in 1990 and which it is now on the verge of doing in North Korea.
After the American defeat in Vietnam, America lost prestige and world Communism gained prestige. Communist insurgencies increased around the world - until Russia got bogged down in the proxy war in Afghanistan. President Reagan sent covert aid to the Afghan rebels. Then Russia lost the war, lost prestige and the red tide waned throughout the world.
The C-Span debate was a classic of facts versus feelings, and moral clarity versus moral confusion. Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran's comments were deeply colored by his emotional horror of war which he ventilated at great length. He was morally confused in his attribution of evil motives to America and benign motives to the Communist dictators. When he debated with Mr. Lind on the facts, O'Brien seemed to reinterpret the facts in a "blame America" leftist fashion. Lind generally stuck to a big-picture perspective supported by hard research. He rebuked Americans of the left and right for losing sight of the big picture. He kept a steady focus on the persistence and conspiratorial nature of Communist expansionism, the horror of living under a Communist dictatorship, and the nature of the strategic global struggle of the cold war.
Vietnam, the Necessary War is a must read for Vietnam veterans who have not yet healed from the experience. Although we were defeated we bought eight years of time in delaying the spread of Communism. Vets, your labor and suffering were not in vain. I also recommend the book to history buffs, strategic big-picture guys, and those who are sick to death of left wing propaganda about Vietnam. If you are a diehard hawk or dove - you won't like it. As for Tim O'Brien's book July, July I recommend it for a bird cage liner or kindling to light your fireplace.
Book Review by Fred Hutchison