Some very searching, interesting comments seem to have surfaced. I don’t think we “conflate” the issue of who advanced the loss of political will and that of whether we could have won, or avoided losing, the Vietnam War.

The idea we are trying to get across is that irrespective of whether staving off defeat was in fact possible, in staying too long we shrunk the range of possible options for trying to do so by amplifying the futility of the war as it had been conducted, and thus lending ever more credence to those who said enough is enough. Had we changed policies earlier in one way or the other – for instance, by moving towards negotiation more earnestly, when we had stronger military traction on the ground to leverage and greater political support at home to back it up – a more agreeable ultimate result would have been more likely.

By contrast, the Paris Peace Accords reflect the naked capitulation that the Nixon administration felt compelled to accept. Further, I would disagree that the United States’ obligations under the Paris Peace Accords “miss the point.” It is true that the United States stopped deploying troops to Vietnam in 1972, and that most were gone by 1973. But Nixon partially offset this loss of ground combat power by maintaining and escalating the air war. The Paris agreement had the effect of binding the United States to cease all military activity in Vietnam in an ostensibly legal way, such that the world and – more importantly – the American public would insist that Washington abide by it. Despite all of the equipment the Americans had bestowed upon ARVN, its leaders were largely resigned and uninspired by the 1970s. They needed U.S. power in some form to survive. That may be what revisionist conservatives say factually in accusing liberals and other doves of a “loss of political will” – a loaded term usually employed speciously to mean a refusal to do what declarant thinks should have been done. Our take is that ill-advised, blinkered American policies promoted both a cynical and enervated South Vietnamese political and military leadership and a loss of domestic political support in the United States that elected leaders were eventually unable to ignore – “will” having very little to do with it.

We are agnostic as to whether the South Vietnamese government could have been reformed had the U.S. tried harder, but the fact remains that it did not try too hard and consequently diminished the probability that the South Vietnamese people would mobilize strongly against Hanoi. We also take no position one way or the other on whether residual American military support could have forced a durable military stalemate. Our stance is rather that bloody-minded U.S. policies that focused narrowly on military success in the end forestalled the political opportunity to provide such support, or to accomplish other beneficial regional ends such as limiting the Khmer Rouge’s trajectory.

Thus, we explicitly acknowledge that Tet had spent the Vietcong in 1968 and that counterinsurgency was starting to work by the early Seventies. But our core contention is that these realities – salutary though they may have been in a vacuum – were beside the point precisely because the American public could no longer credit claims along the lines that there was light at the end of the tunnel no matter how meritorious they might actually have been. For the very reason that military commanders are (rightly) in the business of zealously harnessing honor and duty in the pursuit of their enemies, it was up to the United States’ civilian leadership to step back and make a more dispassionate cost-benefit assessment. This it failed to do in Vietnam. That may be the one point of convergence between us and conservative revisionists like Arthur Herman, but for him that failure cuts the other way. Herman argues in his blunderbuss article “Who Owns the Vietnam War?” in the December 2007 issue of Commentary (Joan Baez does not escape his wrath) that the Johnson administration hindered progress in Vietnam by subjectively focusing on American failures rather than successes and thus behaving timidly and indecisively.

From that position, it’s easy to see where Herman would stand on how to proceed in Iraq. We, on the other hand, believe that the American leadership seems to be following the same pattern of unduly favoring military measures in Iraq over more diplomatic ones that leave better prospects for salvaging U.S. leverage in the region and controlling Islamist terrorism. CENTCOM may point to snapshots of military success resulting from the surge. But if – as is probable – it transpires that that those gains can’t be sustained without maintaining or increasing U.S. military involvement in Iraq, the public will lose all faith and force a more radical and ultimately disempowering drawdown than it would if Washington were to adopt a more moderate, more hedged, and more diplomatically oriented course now.