VIETNAM: The Necessary War.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg
• Position: Review

VIETNAM: The Necessary War By Michael Lind Free Press, $25

"THE VIETNAM WAR WAS A JUST, CONSTITUTIONAL and necessary proxy war that was waged by methods that were often counterproductive and sometimes arguably immoral. The war had to be fought in order to preserve the military and diplomatic credibility of the United States in the Cold War, but when its costs grew excessive the war had to be forfeited in order to preserve the political consensus within the United States in favor of the Cold War. The Vietnam War was neither a mistake nor a betrayal nor a crime. It was a military defeat."

So reads the final paragraph of Vietnam: the Necessary War, by the journalist and political analyst Michael Lind, who is the Washington editor of Harper's and author of Up from Conservatism. Coming at a time when the respectable lunatic Pat Buchanan is declaring that the United States was wrong to fight World War II, an argument that the country was right to fight in Vietnam is a refreshing switch to intellectual seriousness. Lind's aim is not to glorify the conflict -- he calls it "a horrible debacle" -- but to assign the Vietnam War the status of historical inevitability, "less like a tragic error than a battle that could hardly be avoided." Buchanan believes the world would be a better place if the Nazis ran Europe; Michael Lind believes the world is a better place because the United States fought and lost in Southeast Asia. At least Lind has a chance of making his case.

Page-by-page, this book stomps on toes. It seems likely to cause excruciating frenzies of staged partisan indignity regarding precise usage of loaded words; indeed, the author may have hoped to promote himself by goading people into attacking him. Nevertheless, in many respects, Lind's book is a masterwork of factual presentation and analytical argument. Its pages are as densely packed with well-researched factual material, and as tightly reasoned, as those of any book I have ever encountered. Lind has done a brilliant job of assimilating and dissecting the events surrounding Vietnam: and even if he worked almost exclusively from other books and documents, as seems to be the case, his was encyclopedic labor. As an accomplishment of thinking and writing, Vietnam: the Necessary War is terrific. Few books can exceed its power-to-weight ratio.

Having stated the merit of Lind's book, I will use the rest of this space to argue with its faults; fair enough, since Lind employs most of his page length to criticize others. Lind's most basic argument is that Vietnam was fought to sustain American credibility in the Cold War: "what was at stake for the United States was its credibility as the dominant global military power" Credibility as the highest of superpower goals is repeated continuously throughout Vietnam: the Necessary War. Lind acknowledges there was no direct U.S. security stake in Southeast Asia; that the South Vietnamese government was baneful; that many innocents died, at times by our hand. But had the war not been fought, he reasons, Maoist China and the old Politburo (how pleasant to type those words together) would have become much more aggressive on the world stage, leading to greater woes, including more war and more nations falling to Communist dictatorship. In this sense Vietnam: the Necessary War accepts the logic of the domino theory; long sneered at by the left, but rightly revived by Lind as a reasonable fear. Today, with Communism defeated or in retreat nearly everywhere, it is easy to scoff at...