Product Description

In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context -- as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provacative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war.

In an era when the United States often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Iraq, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Ameicans of all political viewpoints.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #478370 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-02
• Released on: 2002-07-02
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
Dan Rather CBS News Michael Lind is one of the smartest and most gifted writers I know of. He is also one of the bravest, unafraid to tackle the most controversial subjects. Now he turns his formidable attentions to the Vietnam War, and the results will dazzle you. More importantly, this book will make you think. Even if, ultimately, you don't agree with every single provocative analysis Michael Lind provides, I guarantee you will be challenged to reassess and reinvigorate every idea you have received, stockpiled, and taken for granted for three decades. Vietnam: The Necessary War is a necessary book -- for anyone who really wants to understand one of the most difficult periods in our history.

John Patrick Diggins Distinguished Professor of History, City University of New York Graduate Center Most Americans prefer to forget the Vietnam War. Lind compels us to remember it in all its complexity and tragedy and to consider military and diplomatic possibilities that almost no other author or statesman has though of raising. Moving through the pages of this richly provocative book is an agitated originality.

Fareed Zakaria managing editor, Foreign Affairs A quarter century after its bitter end, Vietnam remains America's most controversial war and Michael Lind's book is sure to set off new sparks about it. Looking at the war from the heights of grand strategy and the inner reaches of domestic politics, Lind makes a fresh, highly intelligent, and passionate case for rethinking the conventional wisdom. Agree with it or not, it is compelling reading.

About the Author
Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine. He is also the author of five previous books, including The Next American Nation and Up from Conservatism. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications. He holds a master's degree in international relations from Yale University and a law degree from the University of Texas. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface

Having sought to avoid this outcome, the United States found itself at war.

The place was an impoverished peninsula near a major industrial region, to which the United States was committed by a long-standing military alliance. The enemy was a communist dictator who skillfully manipulated the nationalism of his people in an attempt to unite all members of his ethnic group into a single enlarged state under communist-nationalist rule. The dictator's regime, ignoring an ultimatum by the United States and its allies, persisted in sponsoring a low-intensity war against the inhabitants of a neighboring territory that the communist-nationalists sought to bring under their control.

The terrain, wooded and mountainous, favored the communist-nationalists. Throughout history, the region had been invaded many times, by external powers that had often come to grief. The president of the United States and his advisers, stunned by the number of troops that Pentagon estimates called for, repeatedly shelved plans for sending in ground forces.

Nevertheless, the administration believed that something had to be done. If the United States allowed itself to be humiliated by the communist-nationalist regime, then its military credibility would be seriously undermined. The regional alliance that the United States led might dissolve as the area's countries lost faith in American protection. Across the world, both enemies and allies might interpret American retreat as a sign of military incapacity or lack of political resolve. The reputation of the United States for power and determination, the basis of its rank in the regional and global hierarchy, was at stake.

Reluctantly the president ordered the bombing of the communist-nationalist dictator's homeland, hoping that air power alone would compel the dictator to abandon his campaign of aggression. Although a majority of Americans initially supported the bombing, the president's critics accused him of waging war in violation of the Constitution. A number of leading radical leftist intellectuals and journalists denounced the bombing as an act of immoral American imperialism. "Realists" in the press and academy, dismissing the importance of U.S. military credibility as a factor in world politics, claimed that no vital American interest was at stake in this poor and peripheral region of the world. Some conservatives denounced the limitations on the military effort as proof of the folly of trying to wage a "liberal war."

When bombing initially failed to change the enemy's policy, the pressures on the president to commit ground troops increased. The president, a politician more interested in the mechanics of domestic reform than in foreign policy, pondered his options. To back off at this point would result in devastating humiliation for the United States, with consequences around the world that could not be foreseen but which might well be severe. To escalate the war by introducing ground troops would be to risk a bloody debacle and a political backlash. Every choice presented the possibility of disaster.

This is a description of the situation that confronted President Bill Clinton in the spring of 1999, after the United States and its NATO allies began bombing Serbia with the goal of forcing Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic to agree to autonomy for the Albanian ethnic majority in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It is also a description of the dilemma of President Lyndon Johnson in the spring and summer of 1965, when the failure of U.S. bombing raids against North Vietnam to dissuade Ho Chi Minh's communist dictatorship from its low-level war against South Vietnam had become apparent. In each case, what was at stake for the United States was its credibility as the dominant global military power and the survival of a regional alliance -- NATO in the case of the Balkan war, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in the case of the conflict in Indochina. (In fact, SEATO did dissolve, when the United States abandoned Indochina to communist conquest between 1973 and 1975.)

Both Slobodan Milosevic and Ho Chi Minh were communist dictators who manipulated the nationalism of their subjects -- Milosevic in the service of his dream of a Greater Serbia dominating the former Yugoslav federation, Ho in the service of the dream of a united Vietnam dominating all of Indochina. Both Milosevic and Ho promoted their goals by supporting guerrilla terror campaigns in other countries. Milosevic armed, supplied, and directed Serb paramilitary units engaged in mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Kosovo, and other parts of the former Yugoslavia; Ho armed, supplied, and directed Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia who waged war against South Vietnamese military and police forces and murdered tens of thousands of South Vietnamese officials and civilians. In both cases, the low-intensity wars launched by the communist-nationalist dictators produced tidal waves of refugees. Hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs were forced from their homes in different parts of the former Yugoslavia by Serbian ethnic cleansing. Nearly a million residents of North Vietnam fled Ho Chi Minh's rule in the 1950s, and following the communist conquest of South Vietnam in the 1970s more than two million others risked their lives in fleeing the country. Of the two communist-nationalist leaders, Milosevic was the less tyrannical; his Serbian regime was far less repressive than the government of Ho Chi Minh. The latter was a strict Stalinist dictatorship that tolerated no political or intellectual dissent and executed more than ten thousand North Vietnamese villagers in cold blood in a few months because they were landlords or prosperous peasants and thus "class enemies," according to Marxist-Leninist dogma.

Despite these similarities, the U.S. wars in the Balkan and Indochinese peninsulas differed in one fundamental respect. The Yugoslav War was not a proxy war among great powers. Although Russia protested the NATO war against the Serbs and supplied some limited assistance to the Milosevic regime, postcommunist Russia, truncated, impoverished, and weak in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, did not commit itself to defeating American policy in the Balkans. The situation was radically different in the 1960s. The Vietnam War was a proxy war between the United States, the Soviet Union -- then growing rapidly in military power, confidence, and prestige -- and communist China. Despite their rivalry for leadership of the communist bloc of nations, the Soviets and the Chinese collaborated to support North Vietnam's effort to destroy South Vietnam, to promote communist revolutions in Indochina and, if possible, Thailand, and to humiliate the United States. In the 1990s, Serbia was a third-rate military power lacking great-power patrons. In the 1960s, North Vietnam was protected from an American invasion, and equipped with state-of-the-art weapons and air defenses, by the Soviet Union and China, the latter of which sent hundreds of thousands of troops to support Ho Chi Minh's war effort between 1965 and 1968. By the late 1970s, the Vietnamese communists, after annexing South Vietnam, occupying Cambodia, and breaking with and defeating China in a border war, possessed the third largest army in the world and ruled the most important satellite region of the Soviet empire outside Eastern Europe. At the time of the Vietnam War, the United States was engaged in a desperate worldwide struggle with two of the three most powerful and murderous totalitarian states in history; in 1999, the United States faced no significant challenge to its global primacy by another great power or coalition.

The American wars in defense of Kosovo and South Vietnam, then, differed chiefly in this respect: More -- far more -- was at stake in Vietnam.

As a result of the U.S. intervention in the Balkans, the assumption that America's intervention in Vietnam was an aberration, an assumption shared by many critics across the political spectrum, is no longer plausible. Twice in thirty-five years, American armed forces have engaged in massive military intervention in a civil war in a peripheral region in order to demonstrate the credibility of the United States as a military power and an alliance leader. When the Korean War is taken into account, the Vietnam War looks less like an exception and more like one member of a series of similar American limited wars (as of 1999, the Gulf War looks like the exception to the norm established by the Korean, Vietnam, and Yugoslav wars). Whether or not the American intervention in Kosovo ultimately achieves its goals, one thing is certain -- the debate about the Vietnam War in the United States will never again be the same.

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, it took on a second life as a symbol in American politics. For the radical left, the war was a symbol of the depravity of the United States and the evils of "capitalist imperialism." For the neoisolationists and "realists" of the liberal left, the U.S. war in Indochina was a tragic and unnecessary mistake, brought about by American arrogance and an exaggerated fear of the threat posed to U.S. interests by the Soviet Union and communist China. Conservatives, too, had their orthodox view of the conflict. Conservatives joined many military officers in arguing that the United States could have achieved a quick and decisive victory in Indochina, if only the pusillanimous civilian policymakers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had not "tied the hands" of the U.S. military and "denied it permission to win."

One point of view has been missing from the debate over the Vietnam War. The political faction known as liberal anticommunists or Cold War liberals, identified with the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, ceased to exist as a force in American politics in the 1970s, more as a result of partisan realignment than of the Vietnam War. One group of former Cold War liberal policymakers and thinkers sought to ingratiate themselves with the antiwar leftists and liberals who were asc...