The Big Muddy

Americans have a long tradition of rewriting the history of their wars. Nineteenth century "revisionists" traced the origins of the Mexican-American war to a conspiracy of slave owners seeking to expand their control over the federal government. Later generations of revisionists blamed United States intervention in World War I on the pernicious influence of bankers and munitions makers and entry into World War II on Franklin Roosevelt's provoking the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.

The Vietnam War has also had its revisionists but with an unusual twist. In the case of a conflict discredited long before it ended, the generally accepted view was that American leaders had intervened in a war that should not have been fought and probably could not have been won.

Thus, ironically, the first wave of revisionism mounted in the late 1970s by conservative and neoconservative intellectuals and by some former participants comprised a spirited and often passionate defense of a war that was deemed both moral and necessary and that, some argued, could and indeed should have been won. These writings provided an intellectual underpinning for the Reagan administration's vigorous waging of the Cold War. They did not persuade a skeptical public and had little impact on historical writing about the Vietnam War.

Michael Lind's "Vietnam the Necessary War" agrees with these revisionists on some key points but departs sharply from them on others, advancing arguments that are certain to provoke controversy. The Washington editor of Harper's Magazine, Lind calls himself an anti-communist liberal and, like his conservative predecessors, he has an explicit agenda: to correct what he sees as the myths about Vietnam perpetuated by academic and journalistic critics of the war that stand in the way of a vigorously interventionist foreign policy today.

A great deal is packed into these tightly argued pages, but the major points are unmistakably clear and in many cases highly debatable. Lind insists that the war in Vietnam was legal, moral and, most important, as his title boldly asserts, necessary.