President Obama’s dithering over what to do in Afghanistan has renewed interest in Lewis Sorley’s powerful, revisionist book on the Vietnam war, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. Sorley’s and another book, Lessons in Disaster by Gordon Goldstein, “have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama’s presidency,” the Wall Street Journal said. Sorley’s book is relevant because it points out what actually happened in Vietnam: by employing what we now call a counter-insurgency strategy, American forces had actually won the war by 1970, only to toss it away later by abandoning the South Vietnamese government. That strategy, similar to wha

t has been pursued successfully in Iraq with the “surge,” replaced the failed search-and-destroy effort of General William Westmoreland. Despite this history, search-and-destroy, which had failed in Iraq, is what Vice President Biden and other Democrats are urging in Afghanistan. They refer to it today as counter-terrorism. The hero in Vietnam was General Creighton Abrams. He concluded that concentrating on killing enemy soldiers, as Westmoreland had, was a losing strategy. Under Abrams, “the object was not destruction but control, and in this case particularly control of the population.” It worked. “There came a time when the war was won,” Sorley writes. “The fighting wasn’t over but the war was won.” The press missed what was going on, preferring to cover battles. Sorley says: