America in Vietnam - Overview - Is American Guilt Justified?

One way that Guenter Lewy answered his critics was in an essay entitled Is American Guilt Justified? In the essay he suggests that many Americans feels a sense of guilt for having undertaken the Vietnam War, but that "the American sense of guilt is not warranted by the facts about the war which we known today."

Some of my critics have painted me as a kind of moral leper, comparing me to those who deny that the Jewish Holocaust happened, that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Others say my work is a revisionist job, useful, perhaps, in stimulating debate, but otherwise too extreme to be considered reliable. Of course, I disagree with those appraisals.

Lewy describes his conception of legality and morality in the context of war, suggesting that what is legal must necessarily be moral as well: "Because I show that American military tactics are legal, I clearly also undermine assertion that the American conduct in Vietnam was immoral." He suggests also that "immoral conduct must involve immoral intentions", which he believes differentiates the "free-fire zones" in Vietnam from the "terror bombing of civilian populations during World War II".

Restating some of his arguments from America in Vietnam, Lewy asserts that the war in Vietnam does not constitute genocide for a number of reasons, including lack of genocidal intent and "results":

According to statistics developed by the United Nations, the population of South and North Vietnam, during the course of the war, increased at a rate roughly double that of the United States in a comparable period. That alone makes the charge of genocide--i.e., intentional destruction of a whole people--rather grotesque.