“The Necessary War” A Short Rebuttal to Michael Lind’s Book About Vietnam By Suleiman Egeh

admin | Feb 07, 2012 | 0 comments

Michael Lind called his book the necessary war; I would have to change the title of the book, to the unnecessary war. This small country has endured and eventually defeated formidable military forcesand their deadly machines of death ranging from modern war planes, heavy artillery missiles, napalm, longrange missile and the carpet bombing by B52 long rang, strategic bombers.

Vietnam is a poor country which isstrategically located country. This small country was the scene of theintervention of two colonial powers France, and Japan. A third country at thetime at the pinnacle of its power was the United States determined to take theplaces vacated by the then declining colonial powers. In post WW11, the United States was emerging as a world power interms of the military and economics. The writers repeatedly called Ho Chi Minhwho is a referred and legendary leader who defeated three world powers andliberated his country from the yolk of those three colonial powers. If thereway have succeeded Vietnam may never become and independent country. As thesaying goes one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighters. The writersrepeatedly called Ho Chi Minh adictator. He never mentioned these powers invaded Vietnam for their owninterest that is based on their own security, hegemony and control.

Withoutthe long struggle organized by Ho Chi Minh Vietnam would never became an independentstate. In 1954 when the Vietminh freedom fighters decisively defeated theFrench in the historical battle of Dien BienVu, the French surrendered but refused to recognize the new infant state ofNorth Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and his legendary achievement and the defeat ofthree colonial powers are a great inspiration for the entire aspiring nationsuch as the Republic of Somaliland. To the United States the Vietnam War was awar to fight communism, to the Vietnamese the war was a war of liberation,liberty and sovereignty. In the advent of their defeat the France asked. Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the UnitedStates to use nuclear weapons against the Vietminh and Ho Chi Minh, but DwightEisenhower refused the French request, but it is worth mentioning at the sametime, the Eisenhower administration gave huge sums of money and weapons to theFrench colonial to France. Besides Vietnam, France at the time was on the vergeof losing, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, a devastating war of liberation juststarted soon after the French surrender and defeat in Vietnam.

The author asserted thatHo Chi Minh was not a Vietnamese patriot. He called him a tyrant, but failed tomention why the Japanese a, the French and the United States were doing in thatpoor country. Michael assertion are one-sided, biased, and revisionist.His erroneous portrayal of the legendaryHo Chi Minh is as follows: “Ho Chi Minh was not a Vietnamese patriot whoseMarxism was a superficial veneer; like North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Ho was both a nationalist and adoctrinaire Marxist-Leninist whose brutal and bankrupt tyranny was modeled onStalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China.

Ho was not the onlylegitimate nationalist leader in Vietnam; he and his subordinates found itnecessary to execute, assassinate, imprison, and exile noncommunist nationalistleaders and dissidents in both North and South Vietnam.

Theauthor erroneous described Vietnam under his narrow and uninformed manner andcalled the Vietnam War as a necessary war. He also called it a limited war. Hisnarrow-minded are as follows: “The author described the Vietnam War as follows:

“Ihave to tell about the Vietnam War. It was necessary for the United States toescalate the war in the mid-1960s in order to defend the credibility of theUnited States as a superpower, but it was necessary for the United States toforfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domesticpolitical consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts. Indochina wasworth a war, but only a limited war — and not the limited war that the UnitedStates actually fought.”

MichaelLind is new book on Vietnam

The Necessary War: A Reinterpretationof America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict Having sought to avoid this outcome, the United States found itself at war.

Theplace was an impoverished peninsula near a major industrial region, to whichthe United States was committed by a long-standing military alliance. The enemywas a communist dictator who skillfully manipulated the nationalism of hispeople in an attempt to unite all members of his ethnic group into a singleenlarged state under communist-nationalist rule. The dictator’s regime,ignoring an ultimatum by the United States and its allies, persisted insponsoring a low-intensity war against the inhabitants of a neighboringterritory that the communist-nationalists sought to bring under their control.

Theterrain, wooded and mountainous, favored the communist-nationalists. Throughouthistory, the region had been invaded many times, by external powers that hadoften come to grief. The president of the United States and his advisers,stunned by the number of troops that Pentagon estimates called for, repeatedlyshelved plans for sending in ground forces.

Nevertheless,the administration believed that something had to be done. If the United Statesallowed itself to be humiliated by the communist-nationalist regime, then its militarycredibility would be seriously undermined. The regional alliance that theUnited States led might dissolve as the area’s countries lost faith in Americanprotection. Across the world, both enemies and allies might interpret Americanretreat as a sign of military incapacity or lack of political resolve. Thereputation of the United States for power and determination, the basis of itsrank in the regional and global hierarchy, was at stake.

Reluctantlythe president ordered the bombing of the communist-nationalist dictator’shomeland, hoping that air power alone would compel the dictator to abandon hiscampaign of aggression. Although a majority of Americans initially supportedthe bombing, the president’s critics accused him of waging war in violation ofthe Constitution. A number of leading radical leftist intellectuals andjournalists denounced the bombing as an act of immoral American imperialism.”Realists” in the press and academy, dismissing the importance ofU.S. military credibility as a factor in world politics, claimed that no vitalAmerican interest was at stake in this poor and peripheral region of the world.Some conservatives denounced the limitations on the military effort as proof ofthe folly of trying to wage a “liberal war.”

Whenbombing initially failed to change the enemy’s policy, the pressures on thepresident to commit ground troops increased. The president, a politician moreinterested in the mechanics of domestic reform than in foreign policy, ponderedhis options. To back off at this point would result in devastating humiliationfor the United States, with consequences around the world that could not beforeseen but which might well be severe. To escalate the war by introducingground troops would be to risk a bloody debacle and a political backlash. Everychoice presented the possibility of disaster.

Thisis a description of the situation that confronted President Bill Clinton in thespring of 1999, after the United States and its NATO allies began bombingSerbia with the goal of forcing Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic to agreeto autonomy for the Albanian ethnic majority in the Yugoslav province ofKosovo. It is also a description of the dilemma of President Lyndon Johnson inthe spring and summer of 1965, when the failure of U.S. bombing raids againstNorth Vietnam to dissuade Ho Chi Minh’s communist dictatorship from itslow-level war against South Vietnam had become apparent. In each case, what wasat stake for the United States was its credibility as the dominant globalmilitary power and the survival of a regional alliance — NATO in the case ofthe Balkan war, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in the case ofthe conflict in Indochina. (In fact, SEATO did dissolve, when theUnited States abandoned Indochina to communist conquest between 1973 and 1975.)

BothSlobodan Milosevic and Ho Chi Minh were communist dictators who manipulated thenationalism of their subjects — Milosevic in the service of his dream of aGreater Serbia dominating the former Yugoslav federation, Ho in the service ofthe dream of a united Vietnam dominating all of Indochina. Both Milosevic andHo promoted their goals by supporting guerrilla terror campaigns in othercountries. Milosevic armed, supplied, and directed Serb paramilitary units engagedin mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Kosovo, and other parts of theformer Yugoslavia; Ho armed, supplied, and directed Viet Cong guerrillas inSouth Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia who waged war against South Vietnamesemilitary and police forces and murdered tens of thousands of South Vietnameseofficials and civilians. In both cases, the low-intensity wars launched by thecommunist-nationalist dictators produced tidal waves of refugees. Hundreds ofthousands of non-Serbs were forced from their homes in different parts of theformer Yugoslavia by Serbian ethnic cleansing. Nearly a million residents ofNorth Vietnam fled Ho Chi Minh’s rule in the 1950s, and following the communistconquest of South Vietnam in the 1970s more than two million others riskedtheir lives in fleeing the country. Of the two communist-nationalist leaders,Milosevic was the less tyrannical; his Serbian regime was far less repressivethan the government of Ho Chi Minh. The latter was a strict Stalinistdictatorship that tolerated no political or intellectual dissent and executedmore than ten thousand North Vietnamese villagers in cold blood in a few monthsbecause they were landlords or prosperous peasants and thus “classenemies,” according to Marxist-Leninist dogma.

Despitethese similarities, the U.S. wars in the Balkan and Indochinese peninsulasdiffered in one fundamental respect. The Yugoslav War was not a proxy war amonggreat powers. Although Russia protested the NATO war against the Serbs andsupplied some limited assistance to the Milosevic regime, post communistRussia, truncated, impoverished, and weak in the aftermath of the Sovietcollapse, did not commit itself to defeating American policy in the Balkans.The situation was radically different in the 1960s. The Vietnam War was a proxywar between the United States, the Soviet Union — then growing rapidly inmilitary power, confidence, and prestige — and communist China. Despite theirrivalry for leadership of the communist bloc of nations, the Soviets and the Chinesecollaborated to support North Vietnam’s effort to destroy South Vietnam, topromote communist revolutions in Indochina and, if possible, Thailand, and tohumiliate the United States. In the 1990s, Serbia was a third-rate militarypower lacking great-power patrons. In the 1960s, North Vietnam was protectedfrom an American invasion, and equipped with state-of-the-art weapons and airdefenses, by the Soviet Union and China, the latter of which sent hundreds ofthousands of troops to support Ho Chi Minh’s war effort between 1965 and 1968.By the late 1970s, the Vietnamese communists, after annexing South Vietnam,occupying Cambodia, and breaking with and defeating China in a border war,possessed the third largest army in the world and ruled the most importantsatellite region of the Soviet empire outside Eastern Europe. At the time ofthe Vietnam War, the United States was engaged in a desperate worldwidestruggle with two of the three most powerful and murderous totalitarian statesin history; in 1999, the United States faced no significant challenge to itsglobal primacy by another great power or coalition.

TheAmerican wars in defense of Kosovo and South Vietnam, then, differed chiefly inthis respect: More — far more — was at stake in Vietnam.

Asa result of the U.S. intervention in the Balkans, the assumption that America’sintervention in Vietnam was an aberration, an assumption shared by many criticsacross the political spectrum, is no longer plausible. Twice in thirty-fiveyears, American armed forces have engaged in massive military intervention in acivil war in a peripheral region in order to demonstrate the credibility of theUnited States as a military power and an alliance leader. When the Korean Waris taken into account, the Vietnam War looks less like an exception and morelike one member of a series of similar American limited wars (as of 1999, theGulf War looks like the exception to the norm established by the Korean,Vietnam, and Yugoslav wars). Whether or not the American intervention in Kosovoultimately achieves its goals, one thing is certain — the debate about theVietnam War in the United States will never again be the same.

Afterthe Vietnam War ended in 1975, it took on a second life as a symbol in Americanpolitics. For the radical left, the war was a symbol of the depravity of theUnited States and the evils of “capitalist imperialism.” For theneoisolationists and “realists” of the liberal left, the U.S. war inIndochina was a tragic and unnecessary mistake, brought about by Americanarrogance and an exaggerated fear of the threat posed to U.S. interests by theSoviet Union and communist China. Conservatives, too, had their orthodox viewof the conflict. Conservatives joined many military officers in arguing thatthe United States could have achieved a quick and decisive victory inIndochina, if only the pusillanimous civilian policymakers of the Kennedy andJohnson administrations had not “tied the hands” of the U.S. militaryand “denied it permission to win.”

Onepoint of view has been missing from the debate over the Vietnam War. Thepolitical faction known as liberal anticommunists or Cold War liberals,identified with the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, ceased toexist as a force in American politics in the 1970s, more as a result ofpartisan realignment than of the Vietnam War. One group of former Cold Warliberal policymakers and thinkers sought to ingratiate themselves with theantiwar leftists and liberals who were ascendant in the Democratic Party after1968. Among these were the late McGeorge Bundy and his brother William (who, aspart of his campaign to rehabilitate himself, recently wrote a harsh and unfairbook criticizing Nixon’s and Kissinger’s handling of the war that the Bundyshad helped to begin). Former defense secretary Robert McNamara not onlyrecanted his support for the war in his book In Retrospect but endured the abuse offunctionaries of the Vietnamese dictatorship during a humiliating pilgrimage toVietnam in 1997. Another group of former Cold War liberals joined forces withanti-Soviet conservatives, maintaining their support for the Cold War whilejettisoning their pro-labor liberalism in domestic politics. The number ofunreconstructed Cold War liberals thus dwindled in the 1970s and 1980s, makingit easy for radical leftists, left-liberals, and conservatives, in theirdiscussions of the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s, tocaricature and vilify Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their advisers with nofear of rebuttal.

Almosteverything written by Americans about the Vietnam War in the past quartercentury has conformed to one of the three scripts of radical leftism, anti-ColdWar liberalism, or conservatism. Each of these three partisan schools has drawnattention to evidence that appeared to support its preconceptions, whileignoring evidence that contradicted them. These ritualized debates might havecontinued for another generation or two. But two historic developments have nowmade it possible to transcend the thirty-year-old debates about the VietnamWar.

Thefirst development is the end of the Cold War and its aftermath, including theglobal collapse of communism and the realignment of world politics around theUnited States as the hegemonic military power. Only now is it possible to viewthe Cold War as a whole and to evaluate the U.S. strategy of global containmentthat led to the U.S. wars in defense of South Korea and South Vietnam, as wellas the U.S. protectorate over Taiwan — “the three fronts,” accordingto Mao Zedong, where the communist bloc met the American bloc in East Asia.

Thesecond development is the demise of the radical left in North America andWestern Europe as a political force (leftism survives only in pockets in theacademy and the press). In the 1960s and 1970s, the ascendancy of the radicalleft in the liberal and social democratic parties of the West — the Democratsin the United States, the British Labor Party, and the German Social Democrats— caused western electorates to turn to conservative, anticommunist partiesunder the leadership of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl. Theeconomic difficulties of Swedish social democracy, coming soon after thecollapse of the Soviet Union, have discredited western as well as eastern Marxismand permitted the emergence of a new, more moderate center-left, variouslydescribed as “the Third Way” or “the New Center” andsymbolized by President Bill Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair. Asrecently as the Gulf War, which the overwhelming majority of Democrats inCongress voted against, foreign policy debates in the United States pittedanti-American leftists and isolationist liberals against interventionistconservatives. But the subsequent U.S.-led NATO war in the Balkans, supported bymany liberals and opposed by a number of conservatives, has helped torehabilitate the legitimacy of military intervention for many left-of-centerAmericans.

Thesedevelopments in global politics and western politics have made it possible towrite this book, which could not have been written in the 1970s or 1980s. Inthis book, I examine the Vietnam War in light of the end of the Cold War, froma centrist perspective more sympathetic to American Cold War policymakers thanthat of their critics on the left and the right.

TheUnited States fought the war in Vietnam because of geopolitics, and forfeitedthe war because of domestic politics. This being the case, I make two majorarguments in this book, one about the geopolitics, and one about the Americandomestic politics, of the Cold War. The argument about geopolitics is that inthe circumstances of the Cold War, and particularly in the circumstances of the1960s, the United States was justified in waging a limited war to defend SouthVietnam 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 — divisionsfamiliar from previous American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Thetwo subjects of geopolitics and domestic politics are connected by the issue ofthe costs, in treasure and blood, of American Cold War policy. In both theKorean and Vietnam wars, the balance of power between interventionists andisolationists in the U.S. Congress and the public at large was held by a”swing vote” sensitive to casualties. In the 1960s and 1970s, theUnited States could not afford to do too little in Indochina, for fear of adisastrous setback in the Cold War — a struggle that was as much a test ofnerve as a test of strength. At the same time, the United States could notafford to do too much in Indochina, for fear of undermining American publicsupport, first for the defense of the Indochina front, and then for U.S. ColdWar strategy in general. The choice between global credibility and domesticconsensus was forced on American leaders in the late 1960s and early 1970s bythe costs of the war in Vietnam — chiefly, the costs in American lives, thoughthe costs in Indochinese lives and the costs to America’s global militaryinfrastructure and its financial hegemony were also important factors.

This,then, is the story I have to tell about the Vietnam War. It was necessary forthe United States to escalate the war in the mid-1960s in order to defend thecredibility of the United States as a superpower, but it was necessary for theUnited States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the Americandomestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts.Indochina was worth a war, but only a limited war — and not the limited warthat the United States actually fought.

Theargument set forth here differs fundamentally from a new and misguidedconsensus on the subject of the Vietnam War that has become influential inrecent years. That argument holds that it was a mistake to intervene inIndochina at all, but that once the United States had intervened, it should haveused unlimited force to quickly win an unqualified victory. The politicalappeal of this emerging consensus is obvious. While it offers nothing to theradical left, it makes concessions to “realist” left-liberals (whoare acknowledged to have been right about U.S. strategy) and to promilitaryconservatives (who are acknowledged to have been right about U.S. tactics). Asa rhetorical formula that can “heal the wounds of Vietnam,” thisemergent synthesis has much to recommend it. Unfortunately, as an assessment ofthe Vietnam War it is wrong, and to the extent that it influences U.S. foreignpolicy it is dangerous.

Inaddition to examining the Vietnam War from a post-Cold War perspective, one ofthe purposes of this book is to set the historical record straight. I addressthe major myths about Vietnam disseminated by the radical and liberal left atthe time of the war and repeated for three decades afterward. When one examinesthe historical record, one finds that:

Ho Chi Minh was not aVietnamese patriot whose Marxism was a superficial veneer; like North Korea’sKim Il Sung and Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Ho was both a nationalist and a doctrinaireMarxist-Leninist whose brutal and bankrupt tyranny was modeled on Stalin’sSoviet Union and Mao’s China.

Ho was not a SoutheastAsian Tito who might have created a neutral united Vietnam equidistant fromMoscow, Beijing, and the United States in the 1940s or 1950s; there werepro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions among the Vietnamese, but no prowesternfaction. The United States did not miss an opportunity to befriend Ho in 1945or 1950 or 1954 or 1956.

South Vietnam did notviolate international law by refusing to participate in national elections in1956.

The murder of SouthVietnam’s President Diem in the American-approved coup d’état in 1963 did notabort a potential reconciliation of North and South Vietnam.

The South Vietnameseinsurgency was not a spontaneous rebellion against misgovernment; although manynoncommunist South Vietnamese took part, the guerrilla war was controlled byHanoi from the beginning to the end.

The Vietnamesecommunists were never serious about a coalition government for either SouthVietnam or the country as a whole, except as a transition to communist rule;talk of a coalition government was a propaganda ploy intended to fool westernliberals and leftists. (It did.)

The South Vietnameseregime did not fall in 1975 because it was uniquely corrupt and illegitimate.It fell to Soviet-equipped North Vietnamese tanks only because the UnitedStates, which had left troops in South Korea to defend a comparably corrupt andauthoritarian dictatorship, had abandoned its allies in South Vietnam.

Toa remarkable extent, anti-Vietnam War activists recycled both Marxist andisolationist propaganda from previous American antiwar movements. For example,much of the anti-Diem and pro-Ho Chi Minh propaganda echoed the left’svilification of China’s Chiang Kai-shek and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee and itsidealization of Mao Zedong; only the names of individuals and countries werechanged. Various “missed opportunity” myths about U.S.-Vietnamrelations were first spread in the context of relations between the UnitedStates and communist China in the 1940s. The influence of the generations-oldisolationist tradition in the United States is clear in the arguments thatJohnson and Nixon were treacherous tyrants whose foreign wars endangered theU.S. Constitution — arguments almost identical to those made against previouswartime presidents, including Polk, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman. The ease withwhich Francis Ford Coppola could turn Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a parable about European imperialism in Africa,into the movie Apocalypse Now illustrates the extent to which muchanti-Vietnam War literature and art has been generic antiwar propaganda thatcould be illustrated by imagery from any war in any country in any period.

Inthe section of this book dealing with domestic politics, I demonstrate theextraordinary continuities between the anti-Vietnam-War movement and otherantiwar movements — both earlier ones, like the movements opposing U.S.intervention in World Wars I and II, and subsequent ones, like the nuclearfreeze campaign and the opposition to the Gulf War. Most remarkable of all isthe continuity in regional attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy. The Democraticparty’s abandonment of the Cold War liberalism of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnsonfor the neoisolationism symbolized by George McGovern and Frank Church can beexplained almost entirely in terms of the shift in the party’s regional basefrom the promilitary, interventionist South to Greater New England, the regionof the United States associated throughout American history with suspicion ofthe military and hostility to American wars.

Letthere be no doubt: There will be “Vietnams” in America’s future,defined either as wars in which the goal of the United States is to prove itsmilitary credibility to enemies and allies, rather than to defend U.S.territory, or as wars in which the enemy refuses to use tactics that permit theU.S. military to benefit from its advantage in high-tech conventional warfare.The war in Kosovo fits both of these definitions. Preparing for the credibilitywars and the unconventional wars of the twenty-first century will require bothleaders and publics in the United States and allied countries to understandwhat the United States did wrong in Vietnam — and, no less important, toacknowledge what the United States did right.

Suleiman Egeh

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