Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 233 Nonetheless, the book provides a refreshingly simple description of the cultural revolution's lasting effects on China. The human element in this work greatly enhances the foreigner's comprehension of the effects of politics, past and present, on the individual in the People's Republic. Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience. By Gabriel Kolko. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 628 pp. $25.00/cloth. Reviewed by Angela Lykos, M.A. candidate, SAIS. Twelve years after the fall of Saigon, historians and foreign-policy analysts continue to examine why the U.S. effort in Vietnam failed. Gabriel Kolko, a prominent revisionist historian and scholar, presents the Vietnam War from a leftist perspective in Anatomy of a War. He provides a comprehensive study of the major participants in the conflict — the United States, the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, and the Republic of Vietnam — covering the period from before World War II up to the United States' withdrawal in 1973. While Kolko discusses military and political factors, he chooses to emphasize the economic and social conditions indigenous to Vietnam. He argues that if Washington had accurately understood the realities of Vietnam's social order, U.S. leaders would have known enough to realize that involvement in the conflict was a hopeless undertaking. Kolko's primary theme is that economic and social constraints affect a nation's ability to determine its fate and that of other countries. He uses this idea to expound on the broad lessons of Vietnam for U.S. foreign policy. Kolko contends that Washington attempted to institute an ideology and social system that failed to meet the needs of the Vietnamese people. U.S. policies in Vietnam led to rapid urbanization, which further traumatized an already war-torn society. He argues that the Vietnamese rejected American values, such as individualism and the accumulation of wealth, and he concludes that Vietnam was not merely a military struggle but primarily a conflict between two social systems. Whether a communist victory in Vietnam was inevitable and an indication of socialism's superiority over capitalism, as Kolko maintains, is debatable. Others would insist that the United States chose not to win the war militarily because of the tremendous costs, implying that it had the capability to defeat the North Vietnamese. In this analysis, a communist victory was not inevitable; instead, it was the result of a deliberate choice by the United States. Kolko dismisses theories that the United States lost solely because of the wrong military tactics or bureaucratic politics. Washington, he asserts, failed to understand the socioeconomic realities of Vietnam. Kolko characterizes the Diem and Thieu regimes as U.S. puppets who held no real support in Vietnam; therefore, the United States and the Republic of Vietnam felt compelled to rely on military means to win the support of the people . He contends that the Communists won instead because they, not Washington 234 SAIS REVIEW or Saigon, enjoyed the support of the masses. They gained this support by adopting social and economic policies and an ideology that met the needs of the people—for example, through land reform. Consequently, Kolko implies that mass support, not military tactics, was the major determinant of strength in the struggle. The Communists' "personal morality" was another important source of power. According to Kolko, the Communists were the only major actors able to act rationally because only they perceived social and economic realities accurately . Moreover, their victory validated the superiority of communist revolution . Given the Vietnamese social context, communist victory was inevitable. Kolko's emphasis on socioeconomic conditions in Vietnam makes for a unique approach to explaining the war's outcome. The author's personal biases—his opposition to U.S. intervention in the Third World and his Marxist assumptions—influence his conclusions. Nevertheless, his unconventional analysis of the Vietnam conflict is valuable. Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Edited by Benjamin Netanyahu. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986. 245 pp. $18.95/cloth. Reviewed by Diana Tasnadi, M.A. candidate, SAIS. Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu, whose brotherJonathan lost his life leading the 1976 Israeli rescue mission to Entebbe, is no dispassionate analyst of terrorism . Israel's permanent representative to...