Mike Eggleston

Mike Eggleston

Student ID Number: 5417099

Course: HIS 122; (01M, Mergel)

12 November 2007

Word Count: 893

Book Review

Vietnam, The Necessary War

By Michael Lind

Introduction

This nonfiction book by Michael Lind is his fifth and a more recent volume on the subject of Vietnam. Most of Mr. Lind’s book deals with the history of Vietnam seen in many other works. It is when he attempts to prove his thesis (see Overview) that he covers new ground. Mr. Lind’s book should be placed in the context of explaining why we engaged in the war Vietnam and why we exited. Since his book was published in 1999, he had an enormous amount of related works that he could draw on to make his points. His notes cover ten pages of related books and articles. See Bibliography for publishing information on this book and other related works.

Overview

Mr. Lind’s book seeks to explain why the United States fought the war in Vietnam and how we forfeited the war. He has two major arguments:

“The United States fought the war in Vietnam because of geopolitics, and forfeited the war because of domestic politics. The argument about geopolitics is that in the circumstances of the Cold War, and particularly in the circumstances of the 1960s, the United States was justified in waging a limited war to defend South Vietnam and its neighbors against the communist bloc. The argument about U.S. domestic politics is that the Vietnam War was not uniquely divisive. Rather, this particular Cold War proxy conflict exposed preexisting regional, ethnic, and racial divisions in American attitudes about foreign policy-divisions familiar from previous American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (Lind, xiv and xv).

Having established his arguments, Lind goes on to stress U.S. credibility against the worldwide communist threat as the cause for our involvement in Vietnam. Hence, his “ The Necessary War” title. Our exit from Vietnam was caused by US military failure:

“In the final analysis, however, the American public’s support for a sound grand strategy of global military containment of the communist bloc by means of flexible response collapsed for most of the 1970’s because the U. S. military in Vietnam was too inflexible in its response to the enemy’s tactics” (Lind, 105).

By this Mr. Lind means that the US military failed to fight the war as a counterinsurgency and instead relied on the conventional approach of killing the enemy rather than nation building.

Issues

It is an interesting book and raises new issues that I have not seen before. My overall opinion of the book is that it raises many valid points, but lacks a balanced view. Mr. Lind pushes hard to support his thesis, but at times contradicts himself. For example, on page 41 he argues that an internal 1965 White House memo argued that 70% of our purpose in Vietnam was to avoid a humiliating defeat and our reputation as guarantor. This is in line with his argument that preserving our credibility was our reason for entry. On page 78 he indicates that in 1965 losing well meant vindicating U.S. global military prestige and preserving the domestic Cold War consensus. Both miss the point that if concern over credibility is the key factor, we should not go in unless we are reasonably certain of the outcome. Other factors beyond credibility play. He at first denies treaty reasons and the domino theory as reason to go to war, but then embraces the domino effect, which goes against his argument of credibility:

“The regional domino effect in Asia, then, was real. The broader domino theory was discredited. While South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were incorporated into the Communist Block, Thailand, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asia states were not” (Lind, 36).

I would conclude that in his view we lost well (I am not sure how a nation can do that) and so the dominos did not fall. Other broader views seem more persuasive.

“The US commitment to Vietnam, which began back as far as 1950 with President Truman’s decision to help the French to retain their hold over Indochina, was designed to prevent Chinese Communist expansion in Southeast Asia…. The American crusade propelled as it was by the Domino theory and the naïve assumption that the entire region would collapse to the Communists if they won Vietnam, disregarded the complex nationalist diversity of Southeast Asia” (Karnow, 43).

Mr. Lind’s thesis that the military lost Vietnam avoids other factors. While it is true that too much emphasis was placed on conventional military victory and there was too much emphasis on such things as body counts, an effective program of nation building was in place. My opinion is that we lost a war that we could not win. Specifically, we failed to establish and maintain public support for the war (although we had some support in the beginning). More important we backed a South Vietnamese regime that was not competent to win, politically and militarily, when their national survival was at stake.

Conclusions

Overall, the book is worth reading, but I do not agree with the case that Mr. Lind has presented since it is too narrow. Pinning the war on our need to maintain credibility is not persuasive especially when compared to Dr. Karnow’s comments. The idea that the military lost Vietnam does not consider other factors such as lack of support at home and a corrupt South Vietnamese regime that was clearly not up to the job.

Bibliography

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam, A History. New York: The Viking Press, 1983.

Lind, Michael. Vietnam, The Necessary War. New York: The Free Press, 1999

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie. New York: Random House, 1988

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