The difference between Mark Moyar's enormously long and exquisitely detailed political-military history of Vietnam and Tolstoy's War and Peace is that Moyar cites his sources. Unfortunately, his notes -- if one actually takes time to examine them -- often do not support his argument.

Indeed, Moyar's painstaking research does not even support one of his main theses: that the domino theory was, in fact, valid. The case for his second thesis -- that the United States flubbed several opportunities to actually achieve something that might be called victory -- is much stronger.

Harvard and Cambridge educated, Mark Moyar is associate professor of military history at the U.S. Marine Corps University, which is itself something of an oxymoron. When did the Marine Corps training facility at Quantico, Virginia, rise to the status of university? I digress, but the thought raises related questions about the bias that Moyar might bring to the debate.

And a debate it is. There is something of an academic insurgency growing around revisionist history of the Vietnam War, and Moyar, while not the point man on this patrol -- Cornell University professor Keith Taylor has that assignment -- is certainly one of its top intelligence officers.

Despite the failure of this book to connect facts to conclusions, a patient reader can learn a lot from it. Moyar takes us back to the twelfth century to show how political power and boundaries in Southeast Asia have shifted endlessly, how the influence of China, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, and he gives us a remarkable portrait of Ho Chi Minh as a young man.

I had no idea that Ho was one of the founders of the Socialist Party in France, where he lived after WWII. I had no idea he was a communist agent-in-place who launched successively Communist movements in Laos, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Mayer also reviews how Eisenhower kept troops uninvolved by consistently threatening to nuke adversaries, and how newly elected President John F. Kennedy's "dressing down" by Khrushchev in Vienna humiliated the young president into taking a stronger stand in Vietnam than he otherwise might have. He also points out that then, like today in Iraq, many highly regarded generals strongly advised against deeper involvement.

A problem with this book, however, is why should we trust Moyar's assertions when we question others? I for one am not prepared to do all the research to find out. Nevertheless, my scribbled dialogue with Moyar fills his pages: What is your evidence of this? How do you know that?

Case in point: Moyar writes, "The North Vietnamese published grossly inflated rice production statistics [late 1950s] in order to hide both their failures and the enormous disparity in agricultural productivity between North Vietnam and South Vietnam." He cites two authors -- one a North Vietnamese -- to support this statement. But Moyar then adds, after his citation number, almost as though he can't resist, "The only people who enjoyed better living conditions under Communist management than before were a select number of industrial workers and the functionaries of the Communist Party."

How does he know that? He is too young to have been there. If he got it from a source who was there or who has statistics, he should cite it. If not, it's a gratuitous, unfounded quip.

Another case in point: Moyar writes, "Reports of killings by the Diem government [late 1950s] during the Denounce the Communists campaign, though, were much less plentiful than those on the North Vietnamese side during the same period, despite the West's much greater access to the South and its people. In 1959, the Communists complained that from April 1955 to January 1959, the Denounce the Communists campaign took 4,971 lives. Even if the Communists were not exaggerating, the number of persons killed was much lower than the number killed by the Communists in 1945 and 1946 and in the later land reform campaign." (23)

O.K., hike back to note 23 and what do we find? "The Communist complaint is in Thayer, War by Other Means, 117. The Canadian component of the International Control Commission observed that the violence was substantially worse in the North than in the South. Ross, In the Interest of Peace. 121-2."

If Moyar's goal is to persuade the reader that he's not stretching the true meaning of his sources' statements, citations like that -- and there are many -- fail to persuade me. He gives me no confidence at all that his cited sources actually support his assertions. Further, should I accept his premise that his guys are the good guys because their 4,917 killings were -- maybe -- dwarfed by those of the other side ten years earlier? It's a silly premise.

But read on. You'll see where he's headed: He's building a case that Ngo Dinh Diem was "a wise and talented leader" who was on his way to success in warding off the Communist threat, if only the United States had stepped up to the plate when they should have, if only the U.S. ambassadors weren't so incompetent, if only JFK hadn't appointed Henry Cabot Lodge for reasons of U.S. domestic politics, if only Henry Cabot Lodge hadn't engineered (or at least acquiesced to) the assassination of Diem.

And what of the domino theory? To his credit, and rare for historians, Moyar says his research changed his mind. He had already published a history of the latter half of the Vietnam War. In that book, Moyar says, "I also contended that U.S. politicians were wrong to view the preservation of the South Vietnamese government as a vital U.S. interest. In the course of writing Triumph Forsaken, analysis of hitherto unappreciated facts caused me to alter this and other conclusions..."

To his credit, yes, but I'll be darned if I can find an exposition of those "unappreciated facts" or the basis of his altered conclusions. At most, I find a laying out of 1960's opinions by politicians that Malaya, Singapore, and Indonesia were really the prize worth fighting for because they "yielded much of the world's natural rubber and tin" and that Ho had spent time there building communist cells before hunkering down in Hanoi.

Moyar's final sentence sums up his thesis: "The war in Vietnam that America's young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints."

It was a wise war only if one accepts the validity of the domino theory. Moyar's case for this is weak, barely there at all, despite his enormously detailed descriptions of village fortifications, construction techniques of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and precisely how the bullets and knives were delivered to the body of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. All interesting stuff, but irrelevant to his argument.

Perhaps the most compelling rebuttal came in the New York Times October 25th.

Journalist Keith Bradsher's story, "Vietnam's Roaring Economy is Set for World Stage," offers this: "Nearly four decades ago, South Vietnamese leaders mapped out their battle plans inside the presidential palace here [Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon]. When they lost the war, the palace became the base for the People's Committee, which worked to impose tight Communist control.

"But in September it was the scene of a very different gathering: a board meeting of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

"In the three decades since, Vietnam has gone from communism to a form of capitalism, it has begun surpassing many neighbors. It has Asia's second-fastest-growing economy, with 8.4 percent growth last year, trailing only China's, and the pace of exports to the United States is rising faster than even China's.

"American companies like Intel and Nike, and investors across the region, are pouring billions of dollars into the country; overseas Vietnamese are returning to run the ventures.

"In the latest sign of Vietnam's economic vitality, trade negotiators from around the world are preparing, after more than a decade of talks, to put the finishing touches on an agreement, possibly by Oct. 26, for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization."

In the games of international power politics, it seems Monopoly trumps dominoes.