Or You Could Look At A Map

But for me, the more-significant op-ed in today’s Journal is by historian Mark Moyar, whose work on the origins of the Vietnam War — based on part on new information from the communist side of the conflict — has been a revelation (here’s a hint: if Indonesia doesn’t immediately pop into your mind when you think about the reason for the Vietnam intervention, you haven’t read your Moyar). ~John Hood

Well, I haven’t read my Moyar, but it makes sense that there would have been concern about the implications for the region of a successful communist takeover of South Vietnam, since Indonesia was at that time under the rule of a partly Marxist and communist-friendly strongman, Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president and dictator (and father of the former President Sukarnoputri, the first elected post-Suharto Indonesian President).  This doesn’t require reading some guy named Moyar, but would require a basic knowledge of the region’s geography and political makeup in the late 1950s and early 1960s.