Excellent book on counter-insurgency w/ tons of comparative data,
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2082/1_61/53461517/p1/article.jhtml
> ...From People's War to People's Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the
> Lessons of Vietnam. By Timothy J. Lomperis. (Chapel Hill and London:
> University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 440. $55.00.)
Political scientist and policy-intellectual Timothy J. Lomperis offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of the Vietnam War in relation to events in China, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, Cambodia, and Peru. He applies a complex, dense, and often daunting interpretive vocabulary to Vietnam that owes its intellectual parameters and approach to Samuel Huntington's modernization theory.
The author focuses on the Vietnam War as "a crisis in political legitimacy" (xi). Perhaps the most productive parts of this book for historians are the author's discussions of the ways that insurgents and incumbents struggle to become the inheritors of their cultures' primary traditions of political authority. Lomperis tells us that "the communist revolution had to be translated into Vietnamese by the age-old formula of the Mandate of Heaven" (112).
Lomperis also investigates how interventions augment or destroy that effort. He concludes that land reform and free elections will defeat insurgencies and promote the kind of compromise and power sharing that modernization and democracy need. Beyond these useful discussions, however, a strained irony emerges from the author's application of his diagnostic and analytical frameworks.
Lomperis places the Vietnam War in the context of other insurgencies and interventions and subjects every issue to painstaking analysis. This comparison yields the conclusion that the Vietnam War was, after all, "the deviant case" (83). Therefore, "by itself, the Vietnam War has no lessons" (7). The Vietnam War's powerful effect on subsequent military policy and public opinion comes from its ghost-like qualities, which, the reader is led to believe, are irrational and fearsome, but also immaterial to clear- eyed policy makers.
The Vietnam War's inability to yield lessons about insurgency or intervention is because the Tet Offensive was "the end of a revolution" (345). By insisting on an identity between revolution and the strategy of a people's war, Lomperis argues that after Tet, "the struggle for political legitimacy ... was suspended" (346). Because political considerations were inconsequential after Tet, the author feels free to interpret the outcome of the Vietnam War through a conventional history of military strategy. Lomperis argues that "the U.S. ... won a war [that] it thought it lost and lost by default what it could have prevented" (343). According to the author, victory could have come to the U.S. by taking the war to the North. Criticism of U.S. intervention is confined to strategic questions, and America's democratic intentions in Vietnam are assumed and treated unproblematically. Such assumptions and conclusions place this work comfortably within the scope of the so-called revisionist literature on Vietnam. Interested readers will want to compare Lomperis's conclusions to D. Michael Shafer's Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy and Larry E. Cable's Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War. In reaching markedly different conclusions with similar historical examples, these works demonstrate the ongoing conflicts that characterize the political and intellectual legacy of the Vietnam War. From People's War to People's Rule will be most useful to those historians who are interested in refighting the Vietnam War and to policy-makers looking forward to future interventions.
Richard Moser Middle Tennessee State University