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November/December 2007 Historically Speaking 39 ever he might have done earlier, it is difficult to imagine diat Mao, then at the height of his domestic and geopolitical radicalism, would have acquiesced to a U.S. occupation of North Vietnam right up to China's borders. Moyar writes: "Repeating a most unfortunate mistake, the Johnson administration kept announcing that it did not intend to conquer North Vietnam or attack China" (361). This raises an obvious question : If the U.S. should have threatened to end the Vietnam War by attacking China, should it also have threatened to attack the Soviet Union, North Vietnam 's other major patron and supplier? In the 1960s only the lunatic fringe Right in the U.S. fantasized about ending the Vietnam war by "going to the source" in China or the Soviet Union. To be sure, Moyar thinks that China would have been cowed by a U.S. threat, so that a Sino-American war would have been unnecessary. But any American bluff that was credible enough to intimidate Mao would have had to seem credible as well to the U.S. public and other nations. Had the Johnson administration threatened to bomb China, the result would have been alarm in the U.S. and confirmation to those abroad who portrayed the U.S. as a reckless, aggressive empire. If Moyar and Summers are wrong to minimize the possibility of Chinese intervention and a SinoAmerican war comparable to the Korean War, then their case for a quick military fix to the conflict by cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail and/or invading and occupying North Vietnam collapses. Quite apart from the China factor, Moyar's counterfactuals are insufficiendy sketched out. If communist insurgents had fought U.S. troops occupying North Vietnam, what reason is there to believe that the U.S. would have been more successful in pacifying the North at a reasonable cost in American lives than it was in pacifying the South? What would have followed a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam? Would the purpose of a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam have been to unify the country under a noncommunist regime? If not, it is difficult to imagine American public support for turning North Vietnam back over to the very enemy who had just been defeated. If on the other hand the U.S. had successfully restored the status quo ante, would tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops be stationed in Laos and/or North Vietnam today? Despite numerous clashes, North Korea has not sought to conquer South Korea a second time. But what if North Vietnam, following a defeat by the U.S., had attacked the South again, by conventional if not unconventional means? Would the U.S. public have supported several successive Vietnam Wars, at enormous cost? Counterfactuals are a legitimate tool of historical analysis, if used properly. But all of the options must be considered in detail and weighed realistically . Moyar's claim that the U.S. missed an opportunity "to march into North Vietnam" and end the conflict quickly is far too casual (360-61). Having fought a total war in Iraq that annihilated the regime with overwhelming conventional force, the U.S. now finds itself unable to defeat insurgents and facing the prospect of an inglorious retreat accompanied by the collapse of public support and military morale. The timing could not be less auspicious, therefore, for Moyar's resurrection of the Summers thesis about Vietnam. If insurgents succeed in driving the U.S. out of Iraq, then die U.S. will have forfeited two wars, Vietnam and Iraq, because the U.S. military failed to help its allies carry out pacification campaigns at a cost in U.S. military casualties that was low enough to maintain support for the war on the part of the American public. In the aftermath of Iraq, present-day strategists as well as historians are likely to find more of interest in critiques of U.S. failures in counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam than in claims that there were straightforward but foolishly ignored conventional military fixes to the crisis in Indochina a generation ago.2 Michael Lind...

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