Rakesh (here and gone again...)> On top of it, Lind seems to have written a
book in defense of
> genocidal US policies in Vietnam--did I understand you, right,
> Pugliese?
Yes, indeed. A review by Eric Alterman (who raises hackles of alot of
folks but, the URL is handy, said this in (Social Imperialist) Dissent
semi-recently. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/
(darn frames, cut and pastarama)
Oy vey! Todd, "I'm so sorry I didn't vote for Humphrey in '68, " Gitlin
... new book that received deferential reviews last fall but royally
deserved the thumping it got from Eric Alterman (Dissent, Winter 2000)
Michael Lind defends the war as an unavoidable move in an indisputably
righteous and retrospectively cleansed cold war. Regardless of how one
evaluates radical and ...
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/archive/sp00/gitlin.shtml
Michael "Running Dog" Pugliese
If you would like to share this article, or have any questions about
permissions, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED], or write to
Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite 1201, New York, NY 10025. 212.316.3120.
-------------------------------------------------Vietnam: An Unnecessary
Book
Eric Alterman
REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
Vietnam, The Necessary War
by Michael Lind
The Free Press, 1999
314 pp. $25
Michael Lind has written five books and edited another in just four years.
Vietnam, The Necessary War makes that count at least one too many. This book
will likely destroy Lind's reputation among serious students of the war and
its domestic implications. It will certainly bring him no new admirers among
that war's many millions of honorable opponents.
Politically and ideologically, Lind is unclassifiable. He began his career
as an employee of conservative and neoconservative publications, only to
denounce their intellectual leaders in highly conspiratorial terms. Next, he
careened from left to right, publishing one day in the Nation (where I
recruited him) and the next in National Review, and virtually everything in
between. At one moment he is denouncing Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol
for cozying up to the anti-Semitic crank Pat Robertson. Turn around, and he
is viciously attacking David Halberstam, Garry Wills, and Michael Walzer for
being dupes and apologists for communist dictators. Currently Washington
editor of Harper's and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation, Lind
is a seemingly limitless font of ideas and observations. Many of those that
appeared in his first book, The Next American Nation, were quite brilliant.
The ones that appear in Vietnam, to put it charitably, are not.
Lind's argument is as follows: he admits that Vietnam itself was of "no
intrinsic value" to the United States. But the war was "necessary,"
nevertheless "to demonstrate America's credibility as a military power and a
reliable ally to its enemies and allies around the world." Hence, U.S.
political and military leaders "should have imposed an informal limit on the
number of American lives it was willing to spend" in order to "preserve the
military and diplomatic credibility of the United States" in the global cold
war.
Reading this book, which features a bright red globe with a sinister hammer
shadowed across it, it is hard to believe that Lind has been alive for the
past thirty years, much less studying the history of the Vietnam War. Yes,
he is able to find some recently unearthed intra-party communist braggadocio
to support his thesis, as well as a few conservative historians who share
some of his broad biases. But in his rush to exonerate the Johnson
administration for its callous lies and strategic misjudgments, he has
apparently missed out on some of the most fundamental lessons of the past
quarter century.
As implied by the book's lurid cover, Lind's vision of the cold war is
vintage 1965. He speaks of "the lessons of Munich" as if they were
universally agreed upon and applicable across all boundaries and cultures.
He resurrects the domino theory, though he calls it the "bandwagon" effect.
("After the first major defeat or retreat, or perhaps the second, third, or
fourth in a row, confidence in America's military capability, or the
determination to use it, would have collapsed. At that point, something akin
to a panic in the stock market would have ensued. In a remarkably short
period of time-a few years, perhaps even a few months-the worldwide American
alliance system would have unraveled as European, Asian, Middle Eastern,
African and Latin American states hurriedly made deals with Moscow.") He
pays little attention to schisms within the communist world, nor to
conditions of local poverty and political oppression that give rise to
Marxist-tinged revolution. Amazingly, he seems to believe that the Soviet
bloc "was now at the height of its global power in December 1979" following
the invasion of Afghanistan. Is it possible to miss the irony here? Barely
more than a decade later, this alleged global colossus would collapse of its
weight, unable to shoulder even a fraction of the burden with which Lind
credits it.
Lind believes that the Vietnam War was necessary to impress our allies with
our seriousness of purpose. How then to explain the fact that virtually
every single one of those allies thought the war to be a catastrophic and
deeply debilitating diversion from the main challenges of constructing a
stable postwar order amid a continuing East-West competition? In one
extremely odd passage, he argues that this complaint by European and
Japanese leaders "only demonstrates the degree of their anxiety about the
Soviet threat and the shallowness of their confidence in American
credibility." Lind must know he is on shaky ground here, as he quotes a
Japanese trade official in 1982 threatening that Japan will join the
communist bloc if America does not relax its pressure on Japan to open its
markets. Lind admits that such threats "may not have been credible." In fact
they are laughable, and no one besides Lind appears to have ever taken them
seriously. He insists, however, that the "fact that they were made at all is
significant." Just why, he does not say.
Lind's logic grows even stranger when he states that "what the United States
needed in 1969 was a Charles DeGaulle." He apparently fails to notice that
the real Charles DeGaulle had very definite things to say about the war from
day one, and none are them are consistent with any of Lind's arguments. (As
early as the spring of 1964, the French president told George Ball that "our
position in Vietnam was hopeless" and the former French colony was a "rotten
country-le pays pourri" as his country had learned "to its sorrow.")
Moreover Lind's history of the war is oddly checkered, cookie-cut to fit his
ideological arguments. He insists that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution
provided more than sufficient constitutional justification for the entire
war effort, regardless of whether the Johnson administration lied about what
happened there-though he cannot quite bring himself to admit that they did.
(Lind also misstates the date of the first Tonkin incident, and misspells
the name of the U.S. ship involved, the Maddox, making it extremely unlikely
that he consulted the definitive work on the subject, Edwin E. Moise's
Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, published back in 1996.)
Lind compares the constitutionality of Vietnam favorably with that of Korea,
noting that the latter was fought without a constitutionally mandated
declaration as well. But he fails to address the point that Korea was fought
under a UN Security Council resolution that legally bound the United States
to intervene, and to which Congress was a party. In the case of Vietnam, all
Johnson had to hang his 500,000 troops on was a hastily arranged resolution
passed with no debate and based on reports that turned out to be entirely
fictional. In fact virtually none of the lies Johnson told the American
people about the war are mentioned here. The war's lack of democratic
accountability-something that has deeply troubled the military ever since-is
never addressed. Lacking therefore, is any understanding of the outrage that
these lies engendered when people like Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chair J.William Fulbright realized they had been purposely deceived.
Perhaps most egregious of all is Lind's treatment of the opponents of the
war. Much of this section feels as though it could have been lifted from
Norman Podhoretz's 1982 McCarthyite tract Why We Were in Vietnam. Indeed,
Lind relies on many of the same primary sources, most particularly Guenter
Lewy's America in Vietnam, published in 1978. Like Podhoretz, Lind speaks of
a takeover of the Democratic Party by "left-liberals and radical activists."
He lumps together the very different critiques of Noam Chomsky, William
Appleman Williams, and Garry Wills, taking a gratuitous swipe at Wills's
Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Abraham Lincoln, without ever mentioning that
he was the recipient of a savage 1997 Wills review in the New York Times
Book Review. He speaks of the purged Asian specialists of the State
Department as "gullible dupes of Chinese communist propaganda." He refers to
the Communist Party of the 1960s and 1970s as a "major institution of the
American radical left," which is nonsense. He very nearly accuses Robert
Kennedy of treason on the basis of the sketchiest of evidence. (The word
"alleged" for RFK's "treachery" comes and goes as is convenient, though the
quality of the evidence presented never improves.) Using the tactics of
guilt by one-time association, he supposes that Robert McNamara's postwar
dovishness "may have been motivated by personal factors comparable to those
that have driven McNamara's former colleague, former attorney general Ramsey
Clark, to assume the role of perpetual critic of US 'war crimes' from a
position on the extreme left." (McNamara's crimes: He "made a pilgrimage to
Moscow in 1986 to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and met with Fidel Castro in
Havana in 1992.")
It gets worse. Lind speaks of the "alleged 'paranoia' of Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon which he takes to be a perfectly rational-even
Rooseveltian-response to the radicalization of the New York Review of Books
and the New York Times's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, as well as
what he deems to be the "major role in the US antiwar movement" played by
members of the U.S. Communist Party. To demonstrate how strange this is, one
only has to see how deep and wide was Johnson's definition of likely
communists. To take just one minor example, when Fulbright began to question
the wisdom of the war on the Senate floor, the president prevailed upon J.
Edgar Hoover to instigate an FBI investigation to determine whether
Fulbirght was working on behalf of the communists. Hoover put Fulbright
under strict surveillance and professed to discover many "parallels" between
statements made by committee witnesses and "documented Communist Party
publications or statements of communist leaders." On Johnson's explicit
orders, Hoover's men also attempted to provide pro-war senators Everett
Dirksen and Bourke Hickenlooper with "evidence that Fulbright was either a
communist agent or a dupe of the communist powers." True, some paranoids
have real enemies, but very few chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee are communists.
Perhaps the most offensive-and least defensible-passage here is one Lind
likes so much he repeats it twice in just sixteen pages. First, he writes:
"Just as the socialist philosopher Michael Walzer had compared the U.S.
effort in Vietnam to 'the Nazi conquests of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark,
Belgium and Holland,' " so the novelist Kurt Vonnegut declared that "our
leaders committed war crimes in the Gulf War no less surely than Nazis
committed war crimes in World War II." Next comes a denunciation of Walzer's
"shocking and vicious comparison" of "the U.S. effort to defend noncommunist
regimes in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos against incorporation into the
Communist bloc and the Nazi conquests of Czechoslovakia Poland, Denmark,
Belgium and Holland."
First, the political philosopher's landmark study could hardly have less in
common with the novelist's thoughtless comment, made apparently as a blurb
for a book by Clark. Second, what is so "shocking and vicious" about
comparing two wars? Nowhere does Walzer even remotely equate them. In fact,
according to the page Lind cites, he does not say much of anything about
either one. He merely creates an extremely broad category-"aggression"-and
notes that both examples, along with many others, can be said to fall into
it. That Lind expects anyone familiar with Walzer's work to believe that he
equated the United States with Nazi Germany is both naive and foolish. That
he may have wished to sully Walzer's name with those unfamiliar with his
work is both morally and intellectually indefensible.
Finally we must deal with the underlying morality of Lind's ultimate
position. Lind argues that a strategy of "losing well" in Vietnam was worth
a certain price in blood and treasure, but that the United States eventually
exceeded that price, miscalculating costs and benefits. Let us accept his
highly questionable worst-case scenario: that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam
unleashed a "geopolitical catastrophe," resulting in "a worldwide
Marxist-Leninist revolutionary wave" leaving "pro-Soviet Leninist
governments in Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique Southern Yemen,
Benin, and Congo-Brazzaville, along with loosely affiliated regimes in
Zaire, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Madagascar." Later he adds Grenada and
Nicaragua to the mix. I ask you, dear readers, mothers, fathers, and
citizens of a democratic republic: Would you willingly give your children to
save Congo-Brazzaville? Would you give them to "save" any one of the
above-named nations, all of which began as dictatorships from the start?
Once upon a time, the cold war was fought over areas of genuine strategic or
political import: Berlin, Tehran, even potentially Rome and Paris. The mere
fact that Lind is forced to list so many countries that few Americans can
even pronounce demonstrates how soundly the Soviets had been defeated by the
1960s. It is a moral crime of which both sides are guilty moreover, to treat
the third world populations-the "periphery" as they used to be called-as
just so many plastic pawns on cheaply assembled chessboard for the purposes
of impressing one another. Lind's complaint is that we did not play that
murderous game long and hard enough.
Had the United States agreed to honor the 1954 Geneva accords to which it
was a party and forced its client state to do the same by holding free
elections, roughly two million Southeast Asians and more than 58,000
American soldiers would not have died senseless deaths on a battlefield that
Lind admits held "no intrinsic value" for the United States. Perhaps Ho Chi
Minh, the likely winner, would have ended Vietnamese democracy right then
and there. That nation could hardly have suffered a worse fate than the
cynical strategy Lind envisions would have offered it. The South Vietnamese,
let us recall, were well aware of the despotic nature of the northern
regime, and yet precious few of them could bring themselves to take the war
seriously as anything but a for-profit operation designed to squeeze money
out of their rich but foolish sponsors. There is no way to win a war when
the people you are defending do not care to be defended. There is no excuse
for defending one purely on the basis of its alleged symbolic
value-particularly when that symbolism is hardly evident to anyone but
yourself.
Eric Alterman is a Nation columnist and author of Sound and Fury: The Making
of the Punditocracy, Who Speaks for America?: Why Democracy Matters in
Foreign Policy, and It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of
Bruce Springsteen.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
DISSENT /WINTER 2000 /VOLUME 47, NUMBER 1
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rakesh Narpat Bhandari" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 8:57 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:15343] Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: The US Dollar (spend it
fast as you can)
> >>Lind is not a nativist. He is a liberal
> >>nationalist. He may be a Listian, but
> >>to me that is not necessarily a Bad Thing.
> >>The idea that he is a right-wing plant is
> >>hallucinatory.
> >>
> >>mbs
>
> While what Pugliese downloaded includes reasonable criticisms of a
> neo bracero program, it soon became an assault on the poor Mexican
> immigrant. He uses the excuse of a neo bracero program to call for
> the exclusion of poor uneducated Mexicans as such instead of for the
> granting to them of worker and citzenship rights.
>
> The handling of complex studies on the job displacement effects of
> immigration (Bhagwati rung Borjas' clock in my opinion) and welfare
> burden of the poor Mexican immigrant (note Lind does not consider the
> sales taxes which even trabajadores sin papeles pay though they are
> probably in excess of any state benefits which they receive) is
> purely demagogic. Indeed Lind descends into the worst forms of
> scapegoating, and his prose becomes indistinguishable from the
> Brimelow's and Murray's who think a restrictive immigration policy is
> in the eugenic interests of the nation.
>
> >Already both LEGAL and illegal immigration from Mexico are
> >exacerbating America's social problems, because so many Mexican
> >immigrants are uneducated and poor. Mark Krikorian of the Center for
> >Immigration Studies -- a non-profit which advocates tightening
> >immigration laws -- claims that 31 percent of immigrants from Mexico
> >are dependent on at least one major federal welfare program. (my
emphasis)
>
> And then he goes on about their criminal propensities.
>
>
>
> In the thrall of nationalist myth Lind does not consider why a
> tougher immigration policy (and Lind seems to want to limit
> immigration over and above eliminating guest worker programs) may not
> necessarily improve the competitive position of poor citizens, but
> Max would have to study Marx (the mascot of this list) to understand
> why as a result of its laws of motion, the capitalist system will
> create a reserve army of labor out of its valorization base, i.e.,
> its population base, no matter how limited by restrictive immigration
> policy. And taken over by nationalist myth Lind does not consider
> whether there are other more effective policies than restrictive
> nationalist immigration policy (Lind is not just after the neobracero
> program but-it seems to me--the immigration of poor Mexicans under
> any conditions) to improve the conditions of the citizen poor
> (assuming his interest is genuine). And if Lind were truly concerned
> with the position of poor citizen workers rather than in Bell Curve
> fashion the putative dysgenic effects of poor Mexican immigration,
> wouldn't he would be giving other policy advice first and
> foremost--more pro union legislation, an expanded public sector,
> tougher anti anti black discrimination law, etc?
>
> On top of it, Lind seems to have written a book in defense of
> genocidal US policies in Vietnam--did I understand you, right,
> Pugliese? He has also called for a ban on the US import of third
> world goods on the basis of the most superficial arguments that this
> would be good for those poor third world people too. It would surely
> thrust many peoples into a holocaust of poverty.
>
> For Max to rise to the defense of Lind and call him a liberal
> nationalist indicates what a reactionary he is. I thought Max was
> only pulling toes; now I must conclude that it is actually much
> uglier.
>
> The insults will only increase from here, so Michael, I am unsubbing.
>
> Good luck to all you progressive economists which I insist is an oxymoron.
>
> Yours, Rakesh
>
>
