Vietnam, the necessary war : a reinterpretation of America's most disastrous military conflict / Michael Lind.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-306) and index.

Ch. 1.The Indochina Theater: The Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1946-89 --Ch. 2.Why Indochina Mattered: American Credibility and the Cold War --Ch. 3.Inflexible Response: The U.S. Military and the Vietnam War --Ch. 4.The Fall of Washington: The Domestic Politics of the Vietnam War --Ch. 5.Disinformation: Vietnam and the Folklore of the Antiwar Movement --Ch. 6.Credibility Gap: The Myth of the Presidential War --Ch. 7.Was the Vietnam War Unjust? --Ch. 8.The Genuine Lessons of the Vietnam War.

"In this reinterpretation of America's most disastrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes the state orthodoxies of the left and the right and puts the Vietnam War in its proper context - as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War, he argues, was actually the third world war of the twentieth century, and the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan were its major campaigns."--BOOK JACKET.

"Lind offers a provocative reassessment of why the United States failed in Vietnam despite the high stakes. The ultimate responsibility for defeat lies not with the civilian policy elite nor with the press but with the military establishment, which failed to adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war."--BOOK JACKET.