Response to Triumph Forsaken

Abstract

38 Historically Speaking November/December 2007 ality that in 1998—years before then-Governor Bush moved to Washington—a unanimous Senate and more than 90% of the House of Representatives approved the "Iraq Liberation Act" that declared: "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." Indeed, every senior national security official in the Clinton administration and every senior leader of both parties declared that Saddam Hussein had WMD and had to be be stopped. The lies about "lying" continue to divide and weaken our country in a time of national crisis, just as misperceptions about "Vietnam" lead us astray. It is imperative that this record be corrected, and Moyar's book provides valuable insight and ammunition for that struggle. Robert F. Turnerhas studiedthe Vietnam Warfor more thanfortyyears, served twice as an army officer in theAmerican embassy in Saigon during the war, and has taught undergraduate andgraduate seminars on the warat the University of Virginia andthe Naval War College. He is the authororeditorof three books on the war, including Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institute Press, 1975) and Real Lessons of the Vietnam War: Reflections Twenty-Five Years After the Fall of Saigon (Carolina Academic Press, 2002). Response to Triumph Forsaken Michael Lind As a contribution to the debate about the Vietnam War, Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken is impressive in many respects. All too much of the scholarship about the Vietnam War has been a continuation in the academy of the campusbased anti-Vietnam War movement. Too many scholars have sought to portray the conflict as an inexplicable atrocity committed by the United States, rather than as one of several major proxy wars that took place during the Cold War, including the Korean War and the first Afghan War. By drawing on archival material from the communist bloc and by treating the Vietnam War in its context as part of die Cold War, Moyar lives up to the new, higher standard that must be met by contemporary historians of the Vietnam War. Despite the wealth of new information he adduces in its support, Moyar's basic argument is neither original nor persuasive. If the antiwar Left since the 1970s has interpreted the Vietnam War as a senseless mistake or a horrible crime, the consensus on the political Right, and among many in the U.S. military, has been that the Vietnam War was an easily winnable war forfeited by the U.S. because President Lyndon Johnson and civilian defense intellectuals foolishly tied the hands of General Westmoreland and other soldiers. The late Colonel Harry Summers provided the first sustained defense of this thesis in On Strategy: A CriticalAnalysis of the Vietnam War (1982). Triumph Forsaken, as the very tide indicates, is a new restatement of this old theme. According to Moyar, the Vietnam War "was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints." The culprits responsible for the "foolish constraints" are the villains of conventional American conservative political demonology: "What would doomJohnson was neither the illness of the patient nor a faulty diagnosis but a poor choice of remedy. His refusal to order some very feasible actions in Laos and North Vietnam, the result of misplaced fears and faulty intelligence and unwarranted confidence in brainy civilians"—note the slur—"forfeited opportunities to deny the Communists the great strategic advantages that they were to enjoy for the next ten years" (416). Like Summers a generation ago, Moyar argues that if only the civilian liberals of the Kennedy and Counter/actuals are a legitimate tool ofhistorical analysis, ifusedproperly. But all of the options must he considered in detail and weighed realistically. Johnson administrations had not been so pusillanimous , then the U.S. could have prevented the communist conquest of South Vietnam by cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, invading North Vietnam, or both. TheJohnson administration's self-imposed constraints on how the U.S. waged war in Vietnam reflected fear that China would intervene, as it had done in the...