How we lost Vietnam

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TO OPPOSE ANY FOE: THE LEGACY OF U. S. INTERVENTION IN VIETNAM

Edited by Ross A. Fisher, John Norton Moore, Robert F. Turner

Carolina Academic, $50, 618 pages

REVIEWED BY ILYA SHAPIRO

A president elected on promises to avoid foreign entanglements in general and "nation-

building" in particular feels obligated to deploy troops to a hostile foreign land where America has been securing a precarious geopolitical stability for over a decade. Though the engagement was to be short in duration and limited in scope, insurgents pursuing asymmetrical warfare force the United States to change mission parameters and maintain a prolonged presence.

While we will not know for a long while the final outcome of President George W. Bush's decision to enter Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein -- let alone be able to pronounce on the administration's overall conduct of the war on terror -- critics have long been making parallels to Vietnam, and always in the sense that Vietnam was a foreign policy failure.

Whether these parallels are apt, or go beyond the most superficial stylized similarities of the previous paragraph, I will leave for another day. What is more telling is that the specter of Vietnam haunts us still.

Though three decades have passed since that country fell to the communists, and though we have been enmeshed in another (increasingly unpopular) war for nearly three years, politicians and political analysts continue hearkening to America's involvement in Southeast Asia.