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An unnecessary crock: Michael Lind's "Vietnam: The Necessary War" | page 1, 2
But it's when he tries to analyze Indochinese politics that his sheer blazing ignorance comes out in full force. To pigeonhole the Vietnamese, southern or northern, communist or anti-communist, as simple pawns smacks of the kind of dismissive racism that did so much to help the United States lose the war. Independence from colonial control was the passion that drove the Vietnamese, whether they were anti-communists, pro-communists or part of the historically significant third force that fought both American and communist domination --which Lind doesn't even mention. Lind's ideological prejudices are so distorting that he fires off some real whoppers. For years it was rumored that 50,000 Vietnam veterans had committed suicide after the war; Lind gives the number as 500,000. (Several years ago I did my own investigation and found out there was no proof for any number.) Gareth Porter, the scholar who argued that U.S. bombing was responsible for Khmer Rouge atrocities, was in fact the only researcher who held this view; he wasn't, as Lind implies, at all representative of anti-war thinkers. More refugees were not created in communist Vietnam after the war, as Lind claims, than at any previous time; during the war, American bombing and the fighting on both sides created more than a million refugees. All communist regimes are not, as Lind believes, alike; it's absurd to equate the countless victims of Khmer Rouge genocide and of Maoism and Stalinism with the far fewer victims of Vietnamese land reform. But then Lind gets his information on Vietnamese (and Russian) politics almost solely from defectors, who, with their special hatred and the angry sense of betrayal they carry into exile, are notoriously unstable and unreliable sources. Doan Van Thoi, a darling of the far right and Lind's main source, drew some headlines in the late '70s by convincing Joan Baez that the Vietnamese communists had slaughtered millions of victims after they took over in 1975. No Western journalist who stayed on after the takeover, nor any reputable historian since, has found evidence of such a bloodbath. And the newly opened Soviet archives, which Lind depends on heavily, are a dubious source of information about Russian intentions and actions: Like FBI files and the Pentagon Papers, they're rife with raw misinformation and wishful thinking. But the most bizarre of Lind's ideas is his concept of "losing well." He argues that by withdrawing from Vietnam in 1969, President Nixon could have sustained Americans' support for the Cold War -- but Lind never explains why withdrawing five years earlier wouldn't have caused everyone to jump off the American "bandwagon." In a breathtakingly cynical analysis of casualties and the "worth" of the United States' intervention in Vietnam, he writes, "A war to defend a great power's military credibility might be compared to an art auction, which is, among other things, a competition among the rich for prestige." In his view, the fact that you stop bidding (or fighting) at a certain level doesn't mean that the painting (or the war) wasn't worth investing in initially -- just that you've reached your budget's limit. Needless to say, there isn't a hint of the cost in human lives in Lind's flashy cost-benefit computations. Now that it's possible to travel and pursue research in Vietnam and Russia (if not yet in China), it may finally be possible for a historian with a keen, compassionate intelligence to write a solid history of the war, taking into consideration who did what, when and why. "Vietnam, the Necessary War" isn't even a shadow of that book.
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About the writer Sound off Related Salon stories The never-ending war Even in hindsight, no one -- soldier or journalist, politician or scholar -- can agree on what went wrong. Buying false racial peace An unholy alliance of guilty conservatives and fatalistic liberals is propping up our divisive racial spoils system -- and preventing America from finding a higher common ground.
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