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This review appeared in the September 2007 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.

p> strong> Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 br> By Mark Moyar br> (Cambridge University Press, 542 pages, $32) /strong> /p>

A GOOD FRIEND VISITED Vietnam some years back, and returned telling me about his tour of the underground tunnel systems that the Viet Cong had built for protection against American bombs. The intricacy of the tunnels reinforced for him the image of the Viet Cong as an implacable foe that would fight America forever if necessary, no matter what the cost. "We were never going to win that war," he insisted, knowing that I still didn't buy it.

Buying it is easy, though, when the orthodox Vietnam narrative is so embedded in our culture. It goes something like this: Vietnam, an ancient Southeast Asian civilization, had fought against outside intruders, primarily the Chinese, for most of its history. In the 19th century the French arrived and became the country's rulers. Only after World War II did the Vietnamese throw off the colonial yoke, winning a long war against the French in 1954. That struggle was led by Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese nationalist whose goal was a unified, independent Vietnam. Ho was also a Communist, but ideology was only a means to an end. If the Americans had embraced Ho, he might have become an Asian Tito, a Communist leader working independent of Soviet or Chinese influence. But the United States instead threw its support to South Vietnam, propping up a corrupt and often brutal dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, whose repressive tactics brought discredit to the anti-Communist cause. Misreading the importance of Vietnam, foolishly buying into the domino theory, myopic about the distinctions in the Communist world between the Soviets and Chinese, and unable to understand that it faced a nationalist foe that would not surrender, the United States escalated its involvement. Even with enormous commitment of troops and resources, the U.S. suffered the nation's first defeat in warfare, sparking a social and political upheaval at home and providing a cautionary lesson for the uses of military force. And all that for a country that wasn't vital to the United States' policy goals. Vietnam was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You had better sit down, because Mark Moyar says you've got it all wrong. Here goes:

Vietnam was indeed dominated by China, but the Chinese allowed a fair amount of autonomy in exchange for tribute, and the two countries fought only three wars in the nearly thousand years before the troubled 20th century. Ho Chi Minh was never going to become an Asian Tito, because Ho was a Communist above all, dedicated to the goal of international revolution. He adhered closely to Chinese directives, and also received considerable support from the Soviet Union. The corrupt dictator that America supported, Diem, was a near-great man, a leader of formidable intellect and political courage. But because he was such a staunch nationalist, Diem was always clashing with his sponsor -- the U.S. -- even though he knew that he could not prevail without American assistance. The American war planners understood early on that Communism was not a monolith, and that the potential for a split existed between the Soviets and Chinese. They focused on the danger of falling Asian dominoes, a concern borne out by the intentions of the Chinese and North Vietnamese, as well as the political fragility of many countries in the region and their leaders' fears of a U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and their allies were susceptible to discouragement when the U.S. took strong action. Vietnam was not "a foolish war fought under wise constraints," writes Moyar, "but a wise war fought under foolish constraints."

Moyar, an associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University in Quantico, is not the first to argue from what has become known as the revisionist position, but he has the advantage of much newly available source material from both sides of the conflict. Triumph Forsaken is the first of an expected two-volume study. It ends at July 1965, when Lyndon Johnson announced the first large-scale increase of U.S. combat troops -- a point at which, in Moyar's view, the best chances for American success had already passed, though victory was still within reach.

The U.S. failed in no small part because we viewed the Vietnamese through Western eyes-not a surprising fault, but terribly damaging nonetheless. The main source of discord between Diem and the U.S. was Diem's refusal to be as democratic as the Americans wished, even though Diem presided over a traditional culture that revered authority and did not have democratic traditions. "You may find that South Vietnam is not quite America," Diem protested to a reporter, with typical understatement. The Americans felt that Diem's authoritarianism cost him political support, but Moyar points out that the Vietnamese tended to side with the strongest ruler, one who had "moral prestige" and brought order.

THIS CULTURAL DIVIDE was best demonstrated by the Buddhist uprising of 1963, which played such an important role in destroying American support for Diem. New information from the North Vietnamese indicates that the protest movement was significantly infiltrated and spurred on by the Communists. The protests' leader, Tri Quang, was likely a Communist operative, though North Vietnam has never conceded this. The self-immolation of monk Quang Doc -- the iconic photos of which so shocked the West -- may have been coerced by the Communists, Moyar suggests. Military raids on the pagodas restored order and put down the unrest, but key figures in the Kennedy administration, as well as American journalists like the young David Halberstam, were disgusted by Diem's tactics. Both, in their own ways, worked to make a coup inevitable.

topics:
Military, Iraq, Communism