Books: Not Guilty

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If there is something narrow and ultimately unsatisfying about Why We Were in Viet Nam, it is partly that there is little that is new in the book. Moreover, Podhoretz fails to evoke the war's anguish and virtually omits the mistakes and deceptions committed by various Administrations over Viet Nam, however defensible some of them were. Also, when moral arguments are applied to politics or war, logical rigor gets lost. The war critics tossed "morality" around with foolish abandon, but Podhoretz is not precise about it either. Thus the fact that an action begins with noble intentions does not necessarily make it moral, nor does the fact that other actions, in this case the behavior of the victors, were worse. Podhoretz ignores the classic moral problem of means and ends. In the theological concept of the just war, one tenet is that the means must somehow be commensurate with the end. That is a juncture at which moralists and pragmatists can meet. Somewhere during Lyndon Johnson's second term, it became clear that however desirable the end of stopping Communism in Southeast Asia was to most Americans, the effort apparently necessary to bring this about (if it could be brought about at all) was no longer in line with the gains that might. be achieved.

All things considered, it might be just as well to declare an intellectual amnesty on Viet Nam guilt and get on with the urgent question of how the U.S. should in the future cope with challenges overseas. The conventional "lesson" of Viet Nam, of course, concerns the risk of using military force in foreign conflicts. If anything, the U.S. has learned that lesson too well. Despite the fact that Viet Nam was a very special situation, the book suggests a few other useful lessons. One is skepticism about feckless advocacy of "negotiated solutions" between mortal enemies, which keeps reappearing today in the context of Central America and elsewhere. Another is caution about the demands for democratic reforms, especially in the midst of guerrilla war, demands that still erupt any time the U.S. finds itself trying to help a regime that does not pass democratic muster by Western standards.

One of the questions the Podhoretz book indirectly raises is whether America is wise in stressing morality so heavily in its foreign policy— a habit of mind, incidentally, not started by the left. Most Americans today would surely agree with Podhoretz that the U.S. role in the war was no crime. But they would also probably agree with a famous French remark: "It was worse than a crime. It was a blun der."* That is a good place to leave things for a while.

—By Henry Grunwald