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Lind is one of the bad boys of the Beltway. Like Christopher Hitchens, Maureen Dowd and Matt Drudge, he'd rather get off a good line than make a complex, well-reasoned argument. Now 32, he has lurched from one side of the political spectrum to the other and back again. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas, he considered himself a liberal Democrat, but in graduate school at Yale he solicited money from William F. Buckley for a campus magazine. Stints at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and assignments for the left-leaning magazine Dissent and the New York Review of Books followed. A polemicist by nature, he once told the Los Angeles Times, "One side is right and one side is wrong. You can't fraternize with the enemy. You have to drive them out of public life."

Vietnam: The Necessary War By Michael Lind Simon & Schuster Trade Nonfiction 336 pages Buy this book at B&N.com

Lind points to the current consensus on the war -- that it was a mistake to intervene in Vietnam at all, but that once the United States did, we should have used unlimited force to quickly win -- and finds it misguided. Vietnam, he argues, was no aberration (as many Americans would still like to believe) but one of a series of limited wars, like those in Korea and the Balkans, that we have fought to protect our interests.

But Lind quickly falls into the good guys/bad guys reductionism that polemicists find so bracing. The United States had to fight in Vietnam, he argues, because we were facing a communist bloc that sought to crush us and rule the world; the South Vietnamese were our proxies and the North Vietnamese were the puppets of the communist bloc. It's that pesky domino theory again, this time dressed up in a new metaphor, "bandwagoning." Lind sees international power politics as a matter of lesser powers jumping on the "bandwagon" piloted by whichever superpower seems to be dominant at any given time; thus, if the United States hadn't intervened in South Vietnam, everyone would have jumped on the communist "bandwagon." (This unfortunate metaphor conjures up a kind of Metternichian musical comedy set to tunes from "The Music Man." Dominoes is better: You can imagine a tense game, staged à la "The Seventh Seal," with Stalin playing Lind for world domination.)

What if the United States hadn't intervened in Vietnam? What if the course of world politics wasn't entirely attributable to Cold War machinations? What if the global anti-colonial struggles of the period -- which Lind never mentions -- or the economic and social upheavals in various countries also came into play? Why is what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos so different? What about the internecine struggles between the two most powerful members of the communist bloc, Russia and China? What about Afghanistan, where the Russians failed to take over? None of these complicated scenarios fit into Lind's Cold War cartoon of the world.

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