Rating: 
Summary: WOW!
Review: This book is a masterpiece. Not only does Michael Lind put the Vietnam War into an interesting perspective, but he put almost all of American History, especially the 2000 election (no mean feat when writing in 1999) in perspective as well. Tidewater vs Greater New England, and you thought that was only the Civil War! Lind explores the roots of these two predominating subcultures within the United States and examines clinically how each region's attitude towards our wars throught history once again played themselves out in the Vietnam era. For you military/political historians out there, this book is a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Vietnam The Necessay War
Review: This excellent work misses a couple of key points. First, Lind assumes the U.S. lost the Vietnam War, something that is extremely difficult to prove. Indeed, he admits early on that no less a Communist than Mao Tse Tung, having realized the magnitude of U.S. victory, broke with the U.S.S.R. well before the war was over and cut his own deal with the United States. As we all know from the size of our trade deficit with China, this was a decision from which his country has never ceased to benefit. Second, Lind assumes a zero sum symmetry between the contenting Cold War powers. This is also very difficult to prove. In FUTUREWEALTH (St Martins, 2000), I pointed out that the first principle of all policy -- social, economic, and foreign -- is that low cost of information organizations always chase out high cost of information organizations. Since Marx, Communists assumed that the cost of information could be kept very high and rigorously controlled by the state. Liberals assume the reverse: that capitalism will drive the cost of information ever lower. In this extremely asymmetric environment the U.S.S.R. had to collapse. The only question was when. We won the Vietnam War so decisively because our advantages were both relative and absolute, something that could be said of few powers before that time. But that is a commonplace today.
Rating:
Summary: Most Balanced Book on Vietnam I've ever read.
Review: This is the most balanced book I've read on the political background to the Vietnam War. It shatters the myths of both the left and right about the war. Lind makes a convincing case for our involvement, how the war should have been fought, and at what point a withdraw should have begun.
Lind justifies our involvement by saying our world leadership was at stake. He rightfully points out that our allies (in the cold war) would have completely lost faith in us if we had withdrawn from IndoChina. This would have especially become critical during the 1980's when our leadership was tested in Western Europe. Without resolve to stand by Vietnam our Western European Allies may had looked elsewhere for leadership while under the Soviet threat in the 1980's.
Lind also shatters both sides myths about the war. He first exposes the popular myth that if John F. Kennedy had lived he would have kept the United States out of the Vietnam War. Lind exposes this left-wing pipe dream, by Kennedy's own quotes favoring our involvement in the war. Some of these staements were made just a few months prior to his assasination. Indeed, Lind points out that this plan was so secret that Kennedy failed to inform his own brother of it! Lind also shatters the myth (by the right) that if North Vietnam had been invaded the war would have been over. Indeed as Lind pointed out it would have escallated: China made commitmints to Vietnam that their ground troops would have assisted them in actual combat (rather than logistics which was their main role during the war) if a invasion occured. In other words: another Korean War, maybe a larger war. Which was a big fear of the Johnson administration.
Overall, this book is excellent, I would reccomend this book to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Challenges Stale Assumptions
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Enlightening
Review: While this book did not necessarily convince me that Vietnam was in fact a "necessary" war, it certainly debunked just about every myth or assumption about the war I have been taught. From military mismanagement to Johnson's micromanagement, Lind effectively disproved just about every notion that we Americans have come up with in recent years in order to deal with that sore spot in our history. Essentially, Lind makes the argument that action in Vietnam was necessary in order to maintain our commitment to an anti-communist Containment policy, but I think this was the weakest part of the book. He failed to convince me that the loss of Vietnam -- or rather, US lack of action in Vietnam -- would have had a severely detrimental effect on the waging of the Cold War by the United States. The book should have been called "Vietnam: The Misunderstood War," and it would have been far stronger if he had left out the justification arguments. Read this book -- it will teach you many truths.
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