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The never-ending war | page 1, 2, 3
That's just the problem, Lind counters. The realities on the ground were ugly because war is ugly. American and South Vietnamese troops committed atrocities in no lesser or greater numbers than any troops in any war, and the naiveté of the reporters was breathtaking. Lind says that the Cold War demanded not just strength but the appearance of strength and that had the United States forfeited Southeast Asia, the bandwagon effect could have been lethal. The nations of Western Europe, seeing that the United States would not fight, might have shifted allegiance to the Soviets, not out of warm feelings but out of strategic common sense. And the loss of Vietnam, Lind continues, would have led to a global copy-catting, where revolutionaries in countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Syria and the nations of Latin America would have taken the cue, allied with the Soviet Union, and overthrown governments allied with the United States. The problem with Lind's argument is that he chooses his evidence too selectively. Lind believes that the fact that Laos and Cambodia went communist after 1975 and the fact that the Third World became intensely anti-American and pro-Soviet in the late 1970s proves that the fears that the loss of Vietnam would have a deleterious effect on U.S. influence worldwide were correct. Yet he fails to take into account that the deleterious effect might not have been the loss of Vietnam per se, but the loss of Vietnam after nearly 15 years of direct and indirect war during which the United States explicitly tethered its prestige to the outcome of the conflict. And Lind's argument that the disasters of the 1970s would have been even worse had it not been for the preventative policies of the 1960s doesn't truly rebut Logevall's arguments about what actually did happen and what feasibly might have. Lind maintains that the example of Vietnam can teach much to leaders dealing with conflicts in Kosovo and beyond. He thinks that the orthodoxy about Vietnam has dangerously colored contemporary approaches to foreign policy. What he calls the "liberal-isolationist consensus" has created an absurdly high bar to the commitment of U.S. troops, and the military's continued reliance on conventional warfare demonstrates just how blind the Pentagon has been to the actual lessons of Vietnam. A quarter century after the fall of Saigon, the link between Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy is stronger than ever. Though Lind seems to feel that learning from history is simple and that only stupidity or ignorance can prevent us from understanding the legacy of Vietnam and applying that wisdom, most people find that learning from the past is easy to preach but hard to do. For instance, take McNamara's injunction that each side in a potential conflict listen carefully and try to understand the goals and attitudes of the other before escalating. In the case of Kosovo, that necessity was clearly grasped and conflict was still not prevented. Years of dialogue and negotiation between Slobodon Milosevic and Richard Holbrooke ensured that each side had a good reading of the other. That didn't stop the Serbs from cracking down on the KLA, nor did it halt U.S. intervention. Luck, as much as anything else, allowed the Clinton administration to avoid sending in U.S. ground troops. Had Serbia been less industrialized, as North Vietnam was, or had Milosevic been slightly less tractable, the United States would have eventually done so. In addition, as Lind is at pains to remind us, some of the supposed lessons of Vietnam are wrongly learned. The utter unwillingness of the military to countenance putting American troops in harm's way in Kosovo is a direct result of the Vietnam syndrome in action. However, the problem with the Vietnam War wasn't that Americans died; it was what they died for. Thirty years later, we seem to have forgotten that. Perhaps the greatest weakness of Lind's book is that he fails to recognize that his is merely one interpretation of what happened. Like McNamara, he is an absolutist who believes in Truth, and he thinks, just as McNamara thinks, that he knows it. Logevall, for all his prodigious research, understands that his is only one reading. Unlike Lind and McNamara, he wouldn't say that he has found the Truth where others have somehow missed the path. If history were simple, then everyone would understand it, no one would repeat it and lessons would be learned as easily as we learn not to put our hands on a hot stove. Like it or not, Vietnam has become a touchstone for contemporary questions about the United States, about military force and about global power. It is a giant screen onto which we project our fear that we might make the wrong decision and squander our strength. If only we could figure out Vietnam, we could assure our place of preeminence in the world for generations to come. That is a comforting thought. It says that our fate is controllable and that our future can be manipulated. Less comforting but probably more true is that the only thing that we can control is how we write about the past.
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