Weekend Warrior.

Mr. McMaster, a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is author of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Vietnam: The Necessary War, by Michael Lind (Free Press, 336 pp., $25)

Even now, the legacy of America's war in Vietnam remains uncertain. Of those Americans who were of age in the 1960s and '70s, many chose to serve in the armed forces. Others preferred to avoid the hardship, risks, and sacrifices of war. The misdirected ire of those who opposed the war toward those who did their duty, under challenging and difficult conditions, inspired a sense of betrayal among veterans. This has made reconciliation elusive.

The shadow of Vietnam likewise hangs over contemporary foreign-policy debates and decisions involving the use of military force. We continue to debate the causes of the war, its nature, what went wrong, and what we might learn from it. Only in recent years has enough of the historical record become available to permit accurate and comprehensive answers to such questions. Revelations based on new evidence, including tapes of telephone conversations and meetings among high officials, have challenged much of what was conventional wisdom on the subject.

Michael Lind, who is Washington editor of Harper's, has produced a radical reinterpretation of the war in Southeast Asia. According to him, Americans have misunderstood Vietnam and have learned the wrong lessons from it. In Vietnam: The Necessary War, Lind argues that "it was necessary for the United States to escalate the war in the mid 1960s in order to defend the credibility of the United States as a superpower"; but "it was necessary for the United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts." To his credit, Lind casts many of the controversial issues of the Vietnam War in a provocative light. But the author's lack of research and shallow understanding of the historical record lead him to flawed conclusions.

Claiming to "set the historical record straight," Lind is correct in his observation that many misleading and dogmatic books have been published about Vietnam. The early literature was fraught with emotion and based largely on conjecture. Memoirs by those involved with planning the struggle, such as Robert McNamara's In Retrospect, have tended to be selective in the evidence they present, with a propensity to manipulate history consistently with the author's predilections. Lind goes too far, however, in his assertion that "almost everything written by Americans about the Vietnam War in the past quarter century has conformed to one of the three scripts of radical leftism, anti-Cold War liberalism, or conservatism." He often misrepresents or caricatures a book's main arguments to fit his own pre-constructed categories or bolster his assertions. The works of historians such as George Herring, William Conrad Gibbons, Michael Hunt, and Lloyd Gardner do not even appear in his notes. Because he did not conduct primary research, his critiques often amount to little more than assertions.

Lind argues that, owing to the "Cold War grand strategy of global military containment of the Communist bloc," an American war in Vietnam was "unavoidable." He stresses the need at the time to preserve America's credibility and "the basis of its rank in the regional and global hierarchy." That need left American policymakers with no alternative to war. Lind's argument stems from his determination to offer a "centrist perspective more sympathetic to American Cold War policymakers than that of their critics on the left and right." Evidence now available shows that the imperative to contain Communism was indeed an important factor in Vietnam policy but did not make inevitable either American entry into the war or the manner in which the war was conducted.

In his determination to sympathize with American military planners, Lind overlooks the Johnson administration's lies and deceptions. These set the stage for an American war in Vietnam. As early as May 1964, LBJ understood that the situation in Vietnam demanded a difficult choice between war and disengagement. Motivated by short-term expediency, however, Johnson refused to make that decision. He feared that doing so would alienate key constituencies on which the success of his domestic priorities (the 1964 election and the 1965 Great Society legislation) depended. He thus pursued a middle course in Vietnam. This meant gradually escalating the military effort while pledging "no wider war" and promising not to send "American boys" to Southeast Asia. As American involvement deepened, the gap between the truth about what was going on and Johnson's depiction of it to the public widened. In 1965 Americans found themselves at war, without ever having made a clear decision to enter such a conflict. LBJ's behavior was not only undemocratic, but also removed an important corrective to what was an unwise policy.

Lind, however, feels that, in matters of war, the people should grant effective carte blanche to one leader: the president. Thus Lind depicts the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution as a model for future "conditional declarations of war." With such permissive legislation in his pocket, the president could coerce potential enemies with the prospect of war. If coercion failed, he could simply take military action on his own authority. In this scenario, there would be no democratic debate over the most momentous decisions a nation can face, those involving life and death.

Lind goes on to argue that merely preserving national credibility can provide the necessary justification for going to war. This is so even in the absence of a commitment to achieving tangible goals or producing an outcome consistent with clearly defined American interests. Lind's thinking is identical to that of certain members of LBJ's administration. Planning the gradual escalation of the Vietnam War, they recognized that the United States could not guarantee the freedom and independence of South Vietnam without a much larger military effort than the president would consider or the American people would support. Rather than acknowledge the futility of fighting a war under these conditions, Defense Department planners concluded that it would be better to fight in Vietnam and lose than to pursue a negotiated withdrawal. In March 1965, two months after the U.S. had begun bombing North Vietnam and one month after the first ground combat units landed in South Vietnam, John McNaughton, a Harvard Law School professor turned war planner, wrote that all the United States had to do was "get bloodied" and "hurt" Vietnamese Communist forces. This would demonstrate the "lengths to which [the] United States will go to fulfill its commitments." According to Lind, McNaughton's thinking should underpin contemporary policy and future American wars. It remains unclear, though, how lost wars, regardless of the numbers of casualties suffered, enhance a nation's prestige.

For Lind, fighting and dying are ends in themselves. He argues that American soldiers "should be thought of as the equivalent of firemen" and "must learn to swim in quagmires." He proposes that Americans expend lives like currency and compares war to "an art auction, which is, among other things, a competition among the rich for prestige. The fact that one stops bidding for a painting when its price reaches $9,000 does not mean that the painting was worthless all along; it merely means that one has reached the limit imposed by one's budget." Pursuing this metaphor, he insists that "even if one is outbid at an auction, one may have achieved the primary purpose of impressing observers with the fact that one is rich."

Such reasoning stems in part from Lind's simplistic understanding of why America lost the Vietnam War. He argues that had the U.S. military better controlled the "American body count" in Vietnam, a lost war in Southeast Asia would really have been a "partial success" in that it "preserv[ed] America's external credibility and its domestic consensus." Lind asserts that tactics emphasizing pacification and population security would have been less costly and would have "cut off the recruits and supplies flowing to the Viet Cong from the villages in South Vietnam's densely populated coastline." Without support, Lind argues that such a strategy, "emphasizing pacification in the earlier years of the war, would have required fewer United States troops."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew as early as 1964, however, that a strategy designed to secure the population in the South and isolate the Viet Cong from North Vietnamese support would require over 500,000 troops. Perhaps the most glaring oversight here is Lind's failure to consider fully the complexity of the Vietnamese Communist strategy, a strategy that shifted emphasis in time and place, between political action, guerrilla action, and conventional military effort.

The situation in Vietnam demanded a sophisticated counter-strategy that incorporated real political and economic reform, improvements in the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces, population security, isolation of Vietnamese Communist forces from their sources of supply in the North and South, and a robust conventional military capability. Moreover, guaranteeing the freedom and independence of South Vietnam demanded a large presence of American soldiers and a sustained economic effort over a span of years.

Debating what strategy might have worked, however, is largely irrelevant because Americans would not support such a large, protracted commitment of men and treasure. Instead of developing a military strategy to achieve policy goals and committing forces necessary to carry out that strategy, Lyndon Johnson determined the level of military force that was politically palatable in the short term, made that force available to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and instructed them to "kill more Viet Cong." Lind fails to see that the principal problem in our conduct of the war was the sheer absence of a strategy.

Perhaps most significant, Lind neglects the human dimensions of war. Like Robert McNamara and his Pentagon "whiz kids," Lind overlooks the unpredictable psychology of armed conflict. In war, the course of events and losses to enemy action depend in large measure on enemy reactions and initiatives that are difficult to predict and impossible to control. Involving as it does the terror of killing and of death, war demands that soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors understand how their risks and sacrifices contribute to the achievement of some concrete goal. Americans will not tolerate the loss of life if they do not understand how national interests justify it.

Lind's tendency to generalize and his failure to base his arguments on evidence limit this book's value. He argues, for example, that regional difference produced "northern doves" and "southern hawks" in Congress. Yet he neglects to examine the role of party politics and other factors that influence political decisions and public opinion.

Lind titles the conclusion of his book "The Genuine Lessons of Vietnam." But if history is to inform contemporary policy, as Lind would like it to do, we must become familiar with the historical record and remain sensitive to the complexity and uniqueness of human events and experiences. A flawed understanding of history applied as a prescription for the future is, perhaps, more dangerous than ignoring the past altogether. That is the "genuine lesson" of Lind's book.