Michael Lind's Vietnam: The Necessary War
Alterman, Eric
VIETNAM, THE NECESSARY WAR by Michael Lind The Free Press, 1999 314 pp. $25 ICHAEL LIND has written five books and edited another in just four years. Vietnam, The Necessary War makes...
...In fact, according to the page Lind cites, he does not say much of anything about either one...
...Lind's complaint is that we did not play that murderous game long and hard enough...
...After the first major defeat or retreat, or perhaps the second, third, or fourth in a row, confidence in America's military capability, or the determination to use it, would have collapsed...
...He pays little attention to schisms within the communist world, nor to conditions of local poverty and political oppression that give rise to MarxDISSENT / Winter 2000 n 10 5 BOOKS ist-tinged revolution...
...The South Vietnamese, let us recall, were well aware of the despotic nature of the northern regime, and yet precious few of them could bring themselves to take the war seriously as anything but a for-profit operation designed to squeeze money out of their rich but foolish sponsors...
...Reading this book, which features a bright red globe with a sinister hammer shadowed across it, it is hard to believe that Lind has been alive for the past thirty years, much less studying the history of the Vietnam War...
...Had the United States agreed to honor the 1954 Geneva accords to which it was a party and forced its client state to do the same by holding free elections, roughly two million Southeast Asians and more than 58,000 American soldiers would not have died senseless deaths on a battlefield that Lind admits held "no intrinsic value" for the United States...
...It gets worse...
...He merely creates an extremely broad category—"aggression"— and notes that both examples, along with many others, can be said to fall into it...
...political and military leaders "should have imposed an informal limit on the number of American lives it was willing to spend" in order to "preserve the military and diplomatic credibility of the United States" in the global cold war...
...But in his rush to exonerate the Johnson administration for its callous lies and strategic misjudgments, he has apparently missed out on some of the most fundamental lessons of the past quarter century...
...In fact they are laughable, and no one besides Lind appears to have ever taken them seriously...
...Politically and ideologically, Lind is unclassifiable...
...Hoover put Fulbright under strict surveillance and professed to discover many "parallels" between statements made by committee witnesses and "documented Communist Party publications or statements of communist leaders...
...At that point, something akin to a panic in the stock market would have ensued...
...He lumps together the very different critiques of Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, and Garry Wills, taking a gratuitous swipe at Wills's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Abraham Lincoln, without ever mentioning that he was the recipient of a savage 1997 Wills review in the New York Times Book Review...
...Lind compares the constitutionality of Vietnam favorably with that of Korea, noting that the latter was fought without a constitutionally mandated declaration as well...
...He speaks of the purged Asian specialists of the State Department as "gull BOOKS ible dupes of Chinese communist propaganda...
...Nowhere does Walzer even remotely equate them...
...Lacking therefore, is any understanding of the outrage that these lies engendered when people like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair J.William Fulbright realized they had been purposely deceived...
...The mere fact that Lind is forced to list so many countries that few Americans can even pronounce demonstrates how soundly the Soviets had been defeated by the 1960s...
...L L IND BELIEVES that the Vietnam War was necessary to impress our allies with our seriousness of purpose...
...Perhaps Ho Chi Minh, the likely winner, would have ended Vietnamese democracy right then and there...
...That he may have wished to sully Walzer's name with those unfamiliar with his work is both morally and intellectually indefensible...
...Second, what is so "shocking and vicious" about comparing two wars...
...On Johnson's explicit orders, Hoover's men also attempted to provide pro-war senators Everett Dirksen and Bourke Hickenlooper with "evidence that Fulbright was either a communist agent or a dupe of the communist powers...
...Lind also misstates the date of the first Tonkin incident, and misspells the name of the U.S...
...Many of those that appeared in his first book, The Next American Nation, were quite brilliant...
...The war's lack of democratic accountability— something that has deeply troubled the military ever since—is never addressed...
...In fact virtually none of the lies Johnson told the American people about the war are mentioned here...
...Let us accept his highly questionable worst-case scenario: that the U.S...
...effort in Vietnam to 'the Nazi conquests of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium and Holland,' " so the novelist Kurt Vonnegut declared that "our leaders committed war crimes in the Gulf War no less surely than Nazis committed war crimes in World War II...
...How then to explain the fact that virtually every single one of those allies thought the war to be a catastrophic and deeply debilitating diversion from the main challenges of constructing a stable postwar order amid a continuing East-West competition...
...Later he adds Grenada and Nicaragua to the mix...
...He resurrects the domino theory, though he calls it the "bandwagon" effect...
...First, the political philosopher's landmark study could hardly have less in common with the novelist's thoughtless comment, made apparently as a blurb for a book by Clark...
...Turn around, and he is viciously attacking David Halberstam, Garry Wills, and Michael Walzer for being dupes and apologists for communist dictators...
...Lind admits that such threats "may not have been credible...
...The word "alleged" for RFK's "treachery" comes and goes as is convenient, though the quality of the evidence presented never improves...
...Yes, he is able to find some recently unearthed intraparty communist braggadocio to support his thesis, as well as a few conservative historians who share some of his broad biases...
...He apparently fails to notice that the real Charles DeGaulle had very definite things to say about the war from day one, and none are them are consistent with any of Lind's arguments...
...Would you give them to "save" any one of the above-named nations, all of which began as dictatorships from the start...
...Indeed, Lind relies on many of the same primary sources, most particularly Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam, published in 1978...
...He refers to the Communist Party of the 1960s and 1970s as a "major institution of the American radical left," which is nonsense...
...Next comes a denunciation of Walzer's "shocking and vicious comparison" of "the U.S...
...Lind must know he is on shaky ground here, as he quotes a Japanese trade official in 1982 threatening that Japan will join the communist bloc if America does not relax its pressure on Japan to open its markets...
...He insists that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution provided more than sufficient constitutional justification for the entire war ef 106 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 fort, regardless of whether the Johnson administration lied about what happened there— though he cannot quite bring himself to admit that they did...
...Perhaps the most offensive—and least defensible— passage here is one Lind likes so much he repeats it twice in just sixteen pages First, he writes: "Just as the socialist philosopher Michael Walzer had compared the U.S...
...defeat in Vietnam unleashed a "geopolitical catastrophe," resulting in "a worldwide MarxistLeninist revolutionary wave" leaving "pro-Soviet Leninist governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique Southern DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 107 BOOKS Yemen, Benin, and Congo-Brazzaville, along with loosely affiliated regimes in Zaire, GuineaBissau, Cape Verde and Madagascar...
...F INALLY WE must deal with the underlying morality of Lind's ultimate position...
...Much of this section feels as though it could have been lifted from Norman Podhoretz's 1982 McCarthyite tract Why We Were in Vietnam...
...The ones that appear in Vietnam, to put it charitably, are not...
...But he fails to address the point that Korea was fought under a UN Security Council resolution that legally bound the United States to intervene, and to which Congress was a party...
...He insists, however, that the "fact that they were made at all is significant...
...This book will likely destroy Lind's reputation among serious students of the war and its domestic implications...
...Vietnam, The Necessary War makes that count at least one too many...
...Using the tactics of guilt by one-time association, he supposes that Robert McNamara's postwar dovishness "may have been motivated by personal factors comparable to those that have driven McNamara's former colleague, former attorney general Ramsey Clark, to assume the role of perpetual critic of US 'war crimes' from a position on the extreme left...
...There is no way to win a war when the people you are defending do not care to be defended...
...In the case of Vietnam, all Johnson had to hang his 500,000 troops on was a hastily arranged resolution passed with no debate and based on reports that turned out to be entirely fictional...
...To take just one minor example, when Fulbright began to question the wisdom of the war on the Senate floor, the president prevailed upon J. Edgar Hoover to instigate an FBI investigation to determine whether Fulbirght was working on behalf of the communists...
...Lind's argument is as follows: he admits that Vietnam itself was of "no intrinsic value" to the United States...
...Lind argues that a strategy of "losing well" in Vietnam was worth a certain price in blood and treasure, but that the United States eventually exceeded that price, miscalculating costs and benefits...
...Next, he careened from left to right, publishing one day in the Nation (where I recruited him) and the next in National Review, and virtually everything in between...
...Lind's logic grows even stranger when he states that "what the United States needed in 1969 was a Charles DeGaulle...
...Communist Party...
...Is it possible to miss the irony here...
...He began his career as an employee of conservative and neoconservative publications, only to denounce their intellectual leaders in highly conspiratorial terms...
...He speaks of "the lessons of Munich" as if they were universally agreed upon and applicable across all boundaries and cultures...
...ERIC ALTERMAN is a Nation columnist and author of Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, Who Speaks for America?: Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy, and It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen...
...Lind speaks of the "alleged `paranoia' of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon which he takes to be a perfectly rational— even Rooseveltian—response to the radicalization of the New York Review of Books and the New York Times's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, as well as what he deems to be the "major role in the US antiwar movement" played by members of the U.S...
...Once upon a time, the cold war was fought over areas of genuine strategic or political import: Berlin, Tehran, even potentially Rome and Paris...
...McNamara's crimes: He "made a pilgrimage to Moscow in 1986 to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and met with Fidel Castro in Havana in 1992...
...Moreover Lind's history of the war is oddly checkered, cookie-cut to fit his ideological arguments...
...But the war was "necessary," nevertheless "to demonstrate America's maabm...
...He very nearly accuses Robert Kennedy of treason on the basis of the sketchiest of evidence...
...Barely more than a decade later, this alleged global colossus would collapse of its weight, unable to shoulder even a fraction of the burden with which Lind credits it...
...At one moment he is denouncing Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol for cozying up to the anti-Semitic crank Pat Robertson...
...In a remarkably short period of time— a few years, perhaps even a few months—the worldwide American alliance system would have unraveled as European, Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latin American states hurriedly made deals with Moscow...
...VIETNAM, THE NECESSARY WAR by Michael Lind The Free Press, 1999 314 pp...
...As early as the spring of 1964, the French president told George Ball that "our position in Vietnam was hopeless" and the former French colony was a " rotten country—le pays pourri" as his country had learned "to its sorrow...
...Like Podhoretz, Lind speaks of a takeover of the Democratic Party by "left-liberals and radical activists...
...Just why, he does not say...
...There is no excuse for defending one purely on the basis of its alleged symbolic value—particularly when that symbolism is hardly evident to anyone but yourself...
...True, some paranoids have real enemies, but very few chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are communists...
...I ask you, dear readers, mothers, fathers, and citizens of a democratic republic: Would you willingly give your children to save CongoBrazzaville...
...That nation could hardly have suffered a worse fate than the cynical strategy Lind envisions would have offered it...
...25 ICHAEL LIND has written five books and edited another in just four years...
...Currently Washington editor of Harper's and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation, Lind is a seemingly limitless font of ideas and observations...
...In one extremely odd passage, he argues that this complaint by European and Japanese leaders "only demonstrates the degree of their anxiety about the Soviet threat and the shallowness of their confidence in American credibility...
...It will certainly bring him no new admirers among that war's many millions of honorable opponents...
...Perhaps most egregious of all is Lind's treatment of the opponents of the war...
...ship involved, the Maddox, making it extremely unlikely that he consulted the definitive work on the subject, Edwin E. Moise's Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, published back in 1996...
...Amazingly, he seems to believe that the Soviet bloc "was now at the height of its global power in December 1979" following the invasion of Afghanistan...
...It is a moral crime of which both sides are guilty moreover, to treat the third world populations— the "periphery" as they used to be called—as just so many plastic pawns on cheaply assembled chessboard for the purposes of impressing one another...
...108 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...
...As implied by the book's lurid cover, Lind's vision of the cold war is vintage 1965...
...credibility as a military power and a reliable ally to its enemies and allies around the world...
...Hence, U.S...
...To demonstrate how strange this is, one only has to see how deep and wide was Johnson's definition of likely communists...
...That Lind expects anyone familiar with Walzer's work to believe that he equated the United States with Nazi Germany is both naive and foolish...
...effort to defend noncommunist regimes in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos against incorporation into the Communist bloc and the Nazi conquests of Czechoslovakia Poland, Denmark, Belgium and Holland...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
