Selected excerpts from reviews and correspondence

From The Hon. Ian Macphee, former Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations

'Asian Alternatives is brilliant. It's theme is enduring but especially relevant now. It should be used in universities and high schools throughout Australia and beyond.'

From Professor Stuart Macintyre
Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University
Ernest Scott Professor of History, University of Melbourne

'I found the book very difficult to put down, and not just because of the subject: the writing is a delight.'

From The Australian, Weekend Enquirer, 'A War Lost, A Peace Won' by Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan, 30 April 2005

In his penetrating recent book on Vietnam Asian Alternatives, Woodard sees Indonesia's confrontation of Malaysia as providing the alternative focus for any Australian decision not to commit to Vietnam.'

'Woodard offers a scathing portrait of Hasluck, a man consumed by pride and intellectual arrogance, convinced that China was behind the region's troubles, a champion of the domino theory, prepared to speculate with Britsh colleagues about resort to nuclear war to stop China and crippled by a dysfunctional relationship with his department and its formidable chief Arthur Tange.'

From The Weekend Australian, by Francesca Beddie, a former diplomat, 16 September 2006

'Asian Alternatives is for those intrigued to know how public policy is fashioned and who already have some background in the period. In his sometimes quirky, even quaint, language Woodard reveals the diplomat's interest in people (and gossip) as well as in the process of decison-making.He has pored over the documents to substantiate the claim made to him by the formidable former head of external affairs, Arthur Tange, that Barwick would not have taken Australia to war in Vietnam, and in so doing takes on other scholars and commentators, as well as Barwick's biographer, David Marr.

He refutes Graham Freudenberg's claim that Vietnam was a diplomat's war. On the contrary, Woodard says, the decision to go to war was made by the politicians (the highly conservative Menzies and Hasluck) on the recommendation of the military and without the advice of the diplomats, Hasluck having removed the Department of External Affairs' views from papers presented to cabinet.

This matters to Woodard, clearly a staunch believer in the Westminster system, including in the necessity for frank and fearless advice from public servants to their minsters.'

From Joseph M. Siracusa, Director and Professor of Global Studies, RMIT University

If one only had time to read one book on Australia's decision to go to war in Vietnam, Garry Woodard's Asian Alternatives would be the first port of call. Combining a career of diplomacy and scholarship, in equal measure, along the same lines as George Kennan, Woodard makes a compelling case that the decsion to commit troops to that hapless
conflict was made by politicians, limiting themselves to military advice. His Appendix of enduring features in decsion making, pointing to the folly of the Iraq War nearly forty years later is worth the price of admission.

From Defender Autumn 2005

Review by Professor Peter Edwards

'The media has been full of commentary ... arguing whether Iraq will prove to be another Vietnam. Among the leading participants in this debate was Garry Woodard who asserts the validity comparison, and the Prime Minister who rejects it.'

'A principle thene of Asian Alternatives, developed in a chapter at its conclusion, is a counter-factual argument, concerning the replacement of Barwick by Paul Hasluck as Minister for External Affairs. Woodard contends that, if Barwick had remained Minister in 1964-65, Australia woud not have undertaken the commitment to Vietnam, ar at least would have made the commitment in a far more prudent, less open-ended manner. There is nothing wrong in engaging in counter-factual arguments, and this one is as valid and as fascinating (for Australians at least) as the long-standing American contention that, if President Kennedy had not been assassinated in November 1963, American policy towards Vietnam would have been vastly different.'

'This is a valuable and substantial contribution to our understanding of the policy decisions that led to Australias's third largest oilitary commitment of the twentieth century.'

From an Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government discussion paper 'Australian foreign policy and the management of intelligence post September 11' by Professor of Politics James Cotton, Australian Defence Force Academy.

'A scholarly work, by a former Australian ambassador, on the Vietnam commitment concluded that the uncanny resmnblances between this episode and the Iraq case indicated that very little had been learned about the management of the alliance with the US in the interim.'

From The Canberra Times by John Graham, 6 November 2004

'Did Australia go ro war in Vietnam in the same folloe-the-leader style as it did in the Iraq war' That is the basic question Garry Woodard asks in Asian Alternatives, and his answer is a decided yes.'

'Woodard's argumen that the commitment was decided too narrowly is a powerful one ...'

'His argument that questions such as the commitment of troops to Vietnam need more critical examination of all elements of their surrounding circumstances before they are decided, is also strong.'