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

Abstract

Vietnam, The Necessary War. A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict Michael Lind Simon & Schuster, 1999 Michael Lind has written a fascinating and instructive book. It is most specifically about the Vietnam War, but Lind takes care to place the war, as he should, in the context of world strategy during the Cold War. It is a strength (but also a weakness, for reasons I will explain) of the book that Lind has "followed his mind where it leads," seeking to touch on all facets of the still-continuing debate over the war. He would almost certainly not agree, but it is at that "macro" level that this reviewer sees the weakest parts of his book: (a) his discussion of the long-standing debate between "minimal realists" and "maximal realists" about international affairs, and (b) his tying into the thinking advanced by several social theorists that American attitudes and policies about military and world affairs has largely reflected the differing orientations of a long-existing ethnic regionalism in the United States. The weakness comes from the reductionism that is inherent in the positions of both types of "realists" and of the "regionalists." Each focuses on a certain thing, albeit valuable in itself, while ignoring much else that is pertinent. This follows the antiseptic pattern of a fair portion of modern social theory, which formulates abstract cubby-holes that substitute, then, for a direct examination of the world in its complexity. Lind describes himself as a "centrist" with regard to the Vietnam War. But no label captures his thinking adequately, since his is too independent a mind to be neatly encapsulated. As one might expect a "centrist" would, he repeats certain shibboleths from today's conventional wisdom in the United States, which is left-liberal. He argues, for example, that the "China hands" whose advice led to the surrender of China to Mao in the late 1940s weren't Communist agents, as Senator Joseph McCarthy saw them, but just "gullible dupes." This suggests, naively in light of the intellectual history of the 1920s and 1930s, that there was a distinction that was really meaningful between those members of the American intelligentsia who were active Communists and the many who for so many years simply carried on an impassioned love affair with "the Soviet experiment." One of the odder manifestations of Lind's centrism is his opinion that the state-induced famines in the Soviet Union in 1932-33 and in China during the Great Leap Forward from 1958-62 were simply the "unintended consequences" of "socialist economic policies." It is hard to believe that the starvation of several million people goes unnoticed by those who by deliberate policy put and then hold those millions in that position. Lind's mental independence leads him, however, to a great many valuable insights that are by no means simple reflections of the leftliberal worldview. These insights are so numerous that a brief discussion of some of them doesn't fully do the book justice: 1. The view is often voiced that President Nixon's rapprochement with Mao in 1972 was an outstanding stroke of foreign policy acumen a high point in Nixon's presidency that was overshadowed only by his later disgrace. Lind is courageous enough, though, to see through this, and to declare the rapprochement "morally questionable." Mao, Lind knows, had already proved himself one of the great butchers of all time. Lind points out, too, that the rapprochement did not bear the fruit of causing Mao to stop Red China's abundant support of the Communist "proxy war" against the United States in Vietnam. 2. Unlike many, Lind has a realistic understanding of the nature of Soviet Communism (subject to what we noted above about his equivocation over the state-induced famine). He doesn't accept the idea that Communism was a noble experiment that was warped out of shape by "Stalin's gangsterism or Mao's egomania"; rather, he sees, as has become evident in recent historiography, that it was precisely Lenin's doctrines that produced the horrors. …