Rick Perlstein's very Perlsteinian review of Mark Moyar and Lewis Sorley mysteriously overlooks another revisionist account of the Vietnam War: Michael Lind's Vietnam the Necessary War. But when the Movement comes first, it's important not to confuse the issue with idiosyncratic thinkers and quirky, inconvenient interpretations.
« Reihan: Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime | Main | Reihan: Under the El » Reihan: The Missing Vietnam Book01 Oct 2007 05:10 pm Comments (7)
Hi, Reihan. I chose these two books because one was new and constantly came up in right-wing discussions of Iraq, and the other was newly re-released and constantly came up in right-wing discussions of Iraq. A book that came out eight years ago, and that I've never seen referenced in right-wing discussions of Iraq--the underlying gravaman of the essay--didn't fit. You impute motive to me--I dismissed it because it's "quirky" and "inconvenient"--that I can't have, since I haven't read the book. Meanwhile, it's meanwhile unclear to me what movement I serve in the review, and how. Tell me more. 
i think the latest raft of right-wing pushback on vietnam history goes beyond "quirky" and "interpretative." polemics of wishful thinking and ridiculous counterfactuals do not add up to legitimate history, revisionist or not. the idea that the right must change the way we think about vietnam in order to change the way we think about iraq just underscores what a crazy triple bank shot they must be able to hit in order to not go down in history as totally incompetent.
To follow up on Daniel Larison's comment, the description of Lind's book (which I also haven't read) also says that Lind attacks, among other things, "the right-wing contention that the U.S. could have won the war if only the politicians hadn't interfered with the military." That's the argument -- or arguments, insofar as Moyar and Sorely's arguments are different and arguably contradictory -- that Perlstein addresses in his piece. So Reihan should articulate how Lind's book undermines or complicates Perlstein's piece, particularly if Reihan is going to wax snarky about it.
I did read Lind's book, or a third anyway. The underlying claim (that I recall, in any case) is that the US had to fight a limited war to show allies and potential allies, world-wide, that we were willing to do so. I've seen that argument repeated of late, by Douthat, I think. I would have thought that would have influenced the way that we fought the war--if the fight's for show, then I assume you can protect your people more, winning isn't the first criteria, etc.--but I didn't make it to any part that indicated such. Also, it's not clear to me that there is widespread agreement on the left that Vietnam was a foreseeable mistake, only that it was a mistake. In any case, it's wasn't a convincing book, but not because there were huge holes that I could see. It's just another just-so story, which is all you can ever ask for, I suppose. It might have been more convincing to someone who believed that Vietnam was self-evidently a mistake prior to entry. There wasn't enough causation evidence--and I can't imagine what a convincing model would look like--to move me from unforeseeable mistake to had to be done.
Lind's book does not claim that the United States won the Vietnam War, or that it could have. It claims, instead, that the war was a "necessary" one in the Cold War context, one which indicated the length to which the US would go to stop Communist insurgencies in the Third World, even though it failed to stop the Communists in Vietnam. Lind thinks the big-war strategy pursued under Westmoreland (which Moyar applauds) was a huge failure; he disagrees with Sorley, holding that small-war counterinsurgency strategies were never seriously pursued. Most importantly, Lind has no truck with the "stab-in-the-back" theory of the US's loss in Vietnam. Lind calls this the "praetorian critique of US strategy": that interference from politicians prevented the military from pursuing a strategy that would have won the war. I disagree with Lind's claim that the Vietnam was necessary, but the following quote of Lind's is simply prescient: "...the praetorian theory of the Vietnam War is the new orthodoxy in the Pentagon, the Republican Party, and in conservative intellectual circles. Thanks to the majority status of the Republican party and the deference that civilian policymakers today are expected to show to top miliary officials, the praetorian critique is likely to inform America's military strategy in the early years of the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, the lessons of Vietnam that the U.S. military establishment and its political allies have learned are the wrong lessons. Widespread acceptance of the erroneous praetorian critique of the Vietnam War will make it more, not less, likely that the military will repeat the mistakes of that war." -- "Vietnam: A Necessary War", P. 81 And, indeed, it has.
If there is anything that characterizes the war in Iraq, "the deference that civilian policymakers today are expected to show to top military officials" is certainly not it. Rumsfeld came into office determined to smack around the brass like they were the Notre Dame football team. Perlstein's critique of Moyar et al. was based on factual assertions and logical arguments, all of which are falsifiable. Those elements of the review were valuable. (I would like to see Moyar's response). What I found bizarre about Perlstein's review is his apparent belief that follies like "cut and paste" memory only afflict conservatives. He rattles off several statements of this nature ("conservatives mourn differently from you and me.") Apparently, all liberals became psychologically perfect beings sometime around the fall of Saigon. I nearly stopped reading the review after encountering this utter tripe, and it made me think that Perlstein was a pompous jerk - though this hardly makes one a bad historian.
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I haven't read Lind's book, but if the book description is accurate I'm not sure why it would be likely to complicate matters that much. If Lind claims Vietnam was an "inevitable confrontation," as the description says he does, it seems to me that he's plainly wrong. WWI wasn't an inevitable confrontation, but came about through a series of contingent accidents. Had Austria accepted Serbia's terms in July, the entire thing could have been avoided. How much less was Vietnam "inevitable"? Wars of choice aren't usually considered inevitable.
Mind you, Lind is a champion of liberal internationalism, of which Vietnam was the great, failed cause. It may seem easy to say in hindsight that the tightening of a Sino-Soviet grip on the Third World was irrelevant to the outcome of the Cold War, but in fact this process was largely irrelevant to the outcome. Vietnam was the product of making containment a global, rather than a primarily European-oriented, policy. There was nothing inevitable about that, and it wasn't a terribly good idea.
Posted by Daniel Larison | October 1, 2007 5:35 PM