Rating: 
Summary: Johnson accepted the wrong advice and lost the war
Review: Lind(L)does an above average job in this book.There is ,however, a major lapse in his presentation.Early in 1965,President Johnson had a meeting with McNamara,the Bundy brothers,and General of the Air Force Curtis LeMay.LeMay believed that he could end the war in 3 months by means of an around the clock bombing campaign.If this did not end the war,he was fully prepared to destroy the Red River dike (flood control)system.The North Vietnamese would have been warned in advanced that the dikes would be destroyed.This,in fact,would certainly have ended the war.Unfortunately,LeMay's last words to President Johnson in this meeting were that he was "going to bomb them back into the Stone Age"(L is certainly correct that much of LeMay's past advice to American Presidents about applying strategic bombing was either doubtful and/or questionable-see page 104.However,this reviewer believes that in this case LeMay got it right).One of the Bundy brothers piped up that the North Vietnamese were already living in the Stone Age. President Johnson agreed.This won the day for McNamara and the Bundy brothers to apply their academic(economics and political science) game theory approach,which called for a series of bombing escalation campaigns(to impose a cost for not negotiating to end the war)and deescalations(a benefit or reward for negotiating an end to the war).Based on the assumption that the North Vietnamese were rational utility maximizers,they would supposedly negotiate an end to the war.Johnson had a good chance of ending the war in early to mid 1965.Instead,he took the policy advice of academics as opposed to the expert(in this case) advice of LeMay.The result was that the war lasted another 10 years.President Johnson needed to emulate President Lincoln's approach during the American Civil War-do whatever it takes to win the war as soon as possible.War is hell,so get it over with.
Rating: 
Summary: Provacative View of the Vietnam War
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A shameful attempt to justify the unjustifiable
Review: A book that ignores reality, and then some. The propaganda contained in this farce of a book has long been pulverized by works such as Marilyn B. Young's "The Vietnam Wars", Jerry Lembcke's "The Spitting Image", Noam Chomsky's "Rethinking Camelot" and chapters 5,6, and 7 of Chomsky and Edward Herman's "Manufacturing Consent". H. Bruce Franklin's scholarly work also exposes Lind's book for the drivel it really is. The American invasion of Vietnam was an absolute atrocity which no amount of rationalization can explain away.
Rating:
Summary: Credibility Calculus
Review: As a child, watching reports of the Vietnam War on TV, I was puzzled. I had seen movies and read books about World War II, in which American and Russsian forces pushed straight to Berlin to cut off the enemy's head. Why weren't we doing that now? Where was the push to Hanoi? The adults patted my little head. It's not that simple, Timmy. We don't want to take Hanoi. We just want to change their behavior. If we bomb them, but refrain from taking control of their country, they'll realize we mean well and they'll change their behavior.Now comes Michael Lind to pat the heads of all who would question the Best and the Brightest's most famous and ghastly fiasco. The dust jacket touts his demolishing of "the stale orthodoxies of the left and the right". The first stale orthodoxy to be demolished is the idea that we should not have have gone in the first place. Hence the title: Necessary War. Lind's view is that it was a proxy battle in the Cold War. Nothing new in that, but it does come as news to me that the reason for Vietnam was to demonstrate our "credibility as a military superpower". Not only did this flimsy reason suffice for war, according to the author, but to achieve this credibility it was "not necessary for the United States to win the Vietnam War". I had to reread this section several times to be sure I hadn't misconstrued his meaning or come across an editing lapse. No, it was really there: the reason to go to war in Vietnam was to Demonstrate our Credibility. We didn't really have to win, or even stay very long. How long? Lind doesn't measure it in months or years. He measures it in lives. This calculation, which befouls page 79, asserts: "Washington should have imposed an informal limit on the number of American lives it was willing to spend". It "ended up spending nearly sixty thousand lives" when, according to Lind, it could only "afford to lose 15,000-20,000 soldiers...before the public turned against it." You don't need to win to retain credibility and prestige, just "spend" 20,000 lives (excluding the 900,000 Vietnamese--they don't count), cut your losses, and split. Perhaps growing up in the computer age has caused Lind to confuse war with a video game. I certainly hope I'm not the first to point out that American lives, nor Vietnamese lives, are not chips to be spent by him and the other senior fellows in Washington on some nebulous product called American Prestige or American Credibility. Of course, such callous speculation is not new or fresh. The monocled, frock-coated diplomats of the first World War sent millions to the slaughter for...what was it? French prestige? German credibility? There are many things worth fighting for, but prestige and credibility are not among them. Lind then moves on to another orthodoxy to demolish, what he pretentiously calls the "praetorian critique". This is the notion, held by the expendable grunts in the military, that they were not allowed to win in Vietnam. He dismisses as "myth" this belief held by "92% of Vietnam veterans polled by the VA", and also by Ronald Reagan. He then ticks off a number of reasons why we couldn't seize Hanoi, which boil down to 1)The Chinese would come 2)The Russians would come. But his main "fresh" contention to demolish the stale praetorian critique is that the war was not winnable because the US military was too inflexible to adapt to a guerilla war. But that's okay because we didn't need to win to demonstrate our credibility, which, you'll remember, was the whole point of the war in the first place. This line of thinking--we have to go to war to show our credibility, but we can't win the war, but that's okay because we can still show our credibility by losing, and the losing can be blamed on the military, and nobody will mention that civilians control the military--this line of thinking is the very fault line that gave rise to the conservative orogeny which continues to this day, which is not coincidentally a movement grounded in common sense and common decency. Common sense tells you you're not going to be the first military in history to win a war by remaining permanently on the defensive. Common decency dictates that you don't send conscripted boys to be traumatized and maimed and paralyzed and killed unless you have a very good reason. Preservation of Prestige is not such a reason. It's not even close. Back when I was watching this war on TV it never occurred to me that people in power in America could think this way about their own citizenry. This book shows that people like Michael Lind and Lyndon Johnson who view war as a sort of board game or adjunct to the election process are fairly common.
Rating: 
Summary: Johnson was right to keep the war limited
Review: As a former isolationist, this book did nothing less than completely alter my attitude toward U.S. foreign policy and the justice of overseas military intervention. Being familiar with Lind's previous work on U.S. domestic affairs, I was a bit uncomfortable at first when I read in the sleeve Lind's essential views contained within the book. Nevertheless, I gave it a try since I knew he was at least left-of-center on social issues. I was not dissapointed. What it comes down to is this: Vietnam was not just some remote civil war, but an important event of the Cold War; the U.S. was right to be involved (as well as to escalate the conflict with ground forces) but was wrong to prolong the conflict after public opinion turned against the war as a result (primarily) of massive casualties. And it is the military, not the Congress, the president or his civilian advisors, that is to share the burden of the blame for the outcome. Generally speaking, Lind passionately argues that the case for U.S. global hegemony should not rest on the belief that the U.S. provides an ideal order (which it does not), but that the alternative of hostile, anti-democratic empires (ex: nazis, imperial japanese, soviets) would be far worse for the welfare of the world's peoples. Give this book a chance; if anything, you will agree that it provides a fresh insight into the U.S. role in Vietnam as well as it's role abroad generally.
Rating:
Summary: A Provocative Albeit Misleading Thesis About Vietnam!
Review: As a person who has been fascinated by 20th century history for several decades, I have learned to be a bit skeptical about a number of provocative and sensational books that purport to turn conventional wisdom on its head. Often, I have learned, the author has an ulterior motive in trying to correct the record, and understanding the political persuasion of the individual author writing the book is often most helpful in placing the book and its argument in perspective. Nowhere is this more true than with a rash of recent neo-conservative tomes regarding the events of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War. Thus armed, I found Michael Lind's book "Vietnam The Necessary War" fascinating (if unconvincing) reading. My overall impression after finishing the book was that it was part and parcel of a determined neo-conservative effort to so revise our understanding of 20th century history and America's part in the Cold War that it comes to justify our habitual post-WWII siding with regimes that were undemocratic, unpopular, and totalitarian regimes as long as they supported our trade prerogatives rather than surrender to more honorable and democratic impulses to do what was right, honorable, and legal. Ain't capitalism great? Thus, while many of his specific arguments are interesting, rational, and sometimes even convincing, he is quite selective in his marshaling of the facts, and seems to take it as an article of faith that the nature of the communist threat was such that the end justifies the means. Although he never makes the specious argument that the communist threat was a universal one, he comes close. He also callously disregards the methods we sued to combat the indigenous forces of the Viet Cong; yet in employing some of the indiscriminate targeting practices we did, we were more like the Nazis in our callous disregard of human life than most of us want to think about. I still believe Robert McNamara, William Westmoreland, and other should be indicted as war criminals. Indeed, our allies were astonished and dismayed by our brutal attempts to sue sheer firepower to win the day in Southeast Asia. Yet, rather than focus on eliminating the enemy force of Viet Cong, we used blunt firepower and airborne attacks, including carpet bombing, in establishing a reign of terror unlike anything seen since the Second World War. For example, establishing free fire zones where anything moving was a fair target is hardly a credible or defensible combat tactic, especially for a democracy whose putative rationale for entering Vietnam was to safeguard the right of the South Vietnamese to self-govern. Indeed, we stubbornly refused to admit this was a war of attrition against deeply embedded and protected guerilla forces, and never used appropriate tactics as such a campaign would require. Instead, we conveniently disregarded such considerations; like a moron looking for the keys he lost near his parked car under the nearest streetlight two hundred feet away because the light is better there, we adopted a policy to do what was easiest, safest, and convenient, regardless of whether or not it made any tactical or strategic sense. For example, adopting the tactic of firebombing villages and killing innocent men, women and children was a policy borne of frustration and confusion on our part; we either could not or would not recognize that we could not defeat a popular guerilla force that was sheltered by the very people we were sent there to protect. To accept Mr. Lind's argument is to accept the idea that the Russians and Chinese considered Vietnam critical or even relevant to their aims in spreading communism throughout their spheres of influence. Lind seems to ignore the fact that having us pinned down and distracted by Vietnam was not a pleasant and positive set of affairs for our Cold War antagonists. Moreover, as the records of the Soviet Union slowly become available, we are finding that even they were baffled by our intransigence and stubbornness in attempting to do what the French had already demonstrated was impossible to successfully accomplish. And they hardly learned much from our tragic mistakes; the Soviets stumbled badly in attempting to control the Afghans a few years later. My basic problem with Lind's arguments is that to accept them is to buy into the seriously anti-democratic idea that our conduct in foreign policy during the post-war period was justified. If we accept that, we accept that we were justified in toppling more popular governments in Iran for the Shah in a CIA-sponsored coup, in Chile against a duly elected Marxist in favor of a brutal military dictatorship, and on and on and on. Friends, perhaps it is considered naive to believe that if we stand for anything, we should stand for supporting and promulgating the ideals and moral principles on which our country is founded. If so, we should be facilitating democratic governments, whatever their politics, not sabotaging them because it is good for Coca-Cola or the Sugar trust or Alcoa or Standard Oil. This is a book that gives a carefully couched political twist to contemporary history, and a quite disingenuous account of how we came to involve ourselves in Vietnam, why we decided to escalate the participation of Americans in the fighting, and what the consequences of our involvement (or non-involvement) would be. Keep in mind that no less a cold warrior than Richard Nixon learned to his disdain that Vietnam was an obstacle to effectively dealing with the Soviets and the Chinese. Was Nixon wrong? History doesn't seem to think so. Finally. Lind fails to explain why we won the Cold War despite our ignominious defeat at the hands of the Viet Cong. If fighting it was so necessary, why was losing it so inconsequential for us in terms of what happened thereafter? Perhaps it is because fighting the war in Vietnam had less to do with the demands of geopolitical considerations than it did with monumental egos, wrongheaded ideologies, surreptitious motives, and criminal indifference on the part of our leaders. Avoid this book. I cannot recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Platitudes and Gibberish
Review: As the veteran of a much-extended tour in Vietnam, I have a real interest in the events, thoughts, and actions that led to that war. Robert McNamara convinced me that it was an honest mistake based on good intentions and bad assumptions. My further reading resulted in feelings of embarassment for this country and myself. I got Mr. Lind's book hoping it would convince me that my years in Vietnam were justified and proper. He falls considerably short of that mark. He says we were right, but his position seems to serve as its own justification. While his book has an extensive bibliography, the position he takes is poorly supported. He contradicts himself on numerous occasions: he states that "the threat in South Vietnam was not an insurgency but infiltration of North Vietnamese regulars," and (2 pages later) that the war was "primarily though not entirely an externally-directed local insurgency in South Vietnam." He is consistent, however, in saying that our politicians always did the right thing, from getting into Vietnam to getting out and abandoning our allies. His callous attitude towards the country (or countries) of Vietnam and its people suggests that their rightful purpose was to serve as pawns in a global chess game. As much as I wanted this book to reassure me that I had been part of a just cause, it failed miserably. You should move this book to the Fantasy shelf.
Rating: 
Summary: Read this, but carefully.
Review: Book Review of:
"Vietnam: The Necessary War" by Michael Lind, 1999, Simon & Schuster
Review by: M.E. Slaymaker
It's a given that one's thesis will favor supportive sources, but it's shoddy scholarship to overstate. In Vietnam: The Necessary War,Michael Lind claims to "rely heavily on the work of scholars who have also been soldiers," but he ignores the era's most lauded. He mentions that General Matthew Ridgway opposed the Formosa Resolution, but if you blink you will miss it. He uses a couple of quotes from Marine Colonel William Corson but doesn't tell us that Corson joined Ridgway in opposing the war. Lind has drafted a military polemic without addressing the findings and recommendations of the formidable contingent of military leaders who opposed military intervention in Vietnam. Is Lind arrogant enough to think he can ignore them and expect us to consider him an authority? Apparently.
Though it often reads like a political science textbook, this is not just an academic exercise. "Let there be no doubt," Lind writes, "there will be Vietnams in America's future." Not only is he encouraging us to fight them, he is telling us how. Everything is written with the intent of justifying this call to action, but the peculiar construction of Lind's argument is telling. The actual proposal for successful military intervention takes just 28 pages, of which only 12 directly address the question: "What should the U.S. have done in Indochina?" He skims over tactical and practical issues but devotes page after page to theoretical tangents such as "the division between socially liberal, antiinterventionist and antimilitary northerners and socially conservative, interventionist, and promilitary southerners." Much of the book is spent rebuking others for rendering "a collection of debating points that do not add up to a coherent moral argument at all," but that is exactly what Lind does best.
Surely Lind gets the Political Science Quarterly. In Volume 101, Number 4, in an article titled "The American Military's Rationale Against the Vietnam War," we read that:
"[Generals] Ridgway, Shoup, Gavin and other military leaders -- including Air Force General Lauris Norstad; Army Generals William Wallace Ford and Robert L. Hughes; Marine Generals Hugh Hester and Samuel G. Griffith; Rear Admiral Arnold True; and Marine Colonels William Corson and James Donovan (and there are more) -- testified before congressional committees, wrote books and articles, appeared on television and radio programs, and made the front page of American newspapers, always with the message that the Vietnam War was a political, strategic and moral blunder from which the United States should quickly disengage. As a group, the military brass who spoke out against the war gained the attention of millions of Americans, played an important role in the national debate over Vietnam, and . . . were arguably the most respected and influential military figures of their time." [Buzzanco in PSQ v.101,#4]
In his 1956 autobiography, Ridgway wrote that as Army Chief of Staff under Eisenhower:
"I sent out to Indochina an Army team of experts in every field: engineers, signal and communications specialists, medical officers, and experienced combat leaders who knew how to evaluate terrain in terms of battle tactics. They went out to get the answers to a thousand questions that those who had so blithely recommended that we go to war there had never taken the trouble to ask. . . . The area, they found, was practically devoid of those facilities which modern forces such as ours find essential to the waging of war . . . . The land was a land of rice paddy and jungle, particularly adapted to the guerilla-type warfare at which the Chinese soldier is a master. This meant that every little detachment, every individual, that tried to move about that country would have to be protected by riflemen. Every telephone lineman, road repair party, every ambulance and every rear-area aid station would have to be under armed guard or they would be shot at around the clock." [Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway]
Ridgway admits it's easy to make big plans. The hard part is thinking through "the hard cold facts of logistics. . . . How am I going to get Force A from X to Y? And how am I going to supply it once it gets there?"
Lind did not convince me that he has found the answers. He did not sell me on his plan for proxy wars, and he did not prove that fighting them is usually in our best interest even when it requires us to arm a rogue outfit like the Taliban.
Lind relies on the Cold War International History Project to prove points about a communist conspiracy but omits findings that show America "overmilitarizing" a conflict with inferior opponents. He also omits project findings that don't support his insistence that there were no opportunities for a nonmilitary solution in Indochina.
I can appreciate his desire to prove that the Vietnam War was necessary and in our best interest, we just did it wrong (many of us would like to believe that after the fact), but the most spectacular contortions of terminology and text do not make one smart enough to ignore or dismiss findings at will, or to take credit where none is due.
Rating:
Summary: Vietnam - The Necessary War
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: The Unnecessary War
Review: Churchill declared WW II "The Unnecessary War". He would scowl at Lind's superficial description of Johnson's 'Dirty Little War'.
C-Span's Live Interview with authors Tim O'Brien & Michael Lind reveals the breadth & depth of American knowledge or ignorance of the Vietnam tragedy.
Tim O'Brien's comments reveal his search for truth. His book "July, July" will be read with interest.
Michael Lind's comments reflect the superficial nature of his book.
Those of us who served raised questions then and inquired later into why this great nation stooped to retaliate against an event which never happened; 'The Tonkin Gulf Incident'.
Lind fails to address Johnson's reason for lying to Congress and the American people regarding his excuse for acts of war. Johnson's personal reason for arrogant insistence on immediate retaliation before reports of the 'Incident' could be confirmed was too sinister to reveal. There was no justification for Johnson's acts of war. Not then. Not now.
Johnson's primary reason for retaliation was not the threat of communism or concern for the Vietnamese people. Johnson sent men in harms way with lies and deception. The dominant factor in his 'strategy' was the presidential election three months later.
Lind references "Dereliction of Duty" yet apparently did not understand McMaster's definitive report on lessons learned from Vietnam. Secret documents released in '95 reveal each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lied in support of Johnson's lies and deception. Lind fails to match the documented historical evidence of McMaster's superlative work.
Refuted by historical fact, Lind's logic does not hold water.
Churchill would recognize Lind's assertion as a farce.
Lind apparently rejects "The Wrong War" analysis.
Historians will recognize Lind's premise is a fabrication of the same lies McNamara used in his 'Mea Culpa'. Lind's credibility is destroyed by the harsh reality he fails to acknowledge.
During C-Span's live interview Lind dismissed one caller by asserting the same logic would have be applied to Korea and the Gulf War. Not so. Retaliation to the 'Tonkin Gulf Incident' was the direct result of Johnson's insistence on trolling operations to trigger a response by the North Vietnamese. Johnson claimed the North Vietnamese response as a provocative attack. It was not. Johnson knew it was a predictable defensive response yet he desperately sought an 'excuse' to retaliate so he 'cooked the books', claiming an attack which never was. A 'Little War' was part of Johnson's strategy to win the '64 presidential election three months later.
Johnson's 'Piss ant Little War' was triggered to achieve a domestic election victory. That is the harsh reality Lind fails to address in his claim the Vietnamese War was necessary.
Lind's warped logic and superficial analysis will be recognized and discarded by historians for it is unfounded.
Johnson's contempt for military personnel was blatant and degrading. He sent men in harms way without concern for tragic consequences on either side. Johnson lashed out with the only tactics he commanded; Intimidation, threat & domination. Those who challenged him were summarily dismissed, including his own VP.
Initial reaction to Lind's book was to disregard it; later read to refute it. Those who support Lind's theory do so in ignorance.
Those with conviction to learn the harsh reality will read Mac Masters's "Dereliction of Duty", "The Wrong War" and other credible works. Lind's book does not meet that standard.
HdB
|
