Posted by
Eutychus on Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:27:39 PM
The recent upswing in violence in and around Baghdad is being characterized by the mainstream news media as a parallel to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which became the turning point for American policy, and cemented in the minds of Americans that the war was being lost. In reality, the Tet offensive was a huge defeat for the North Vietnamese. It was the American mainstream news media that spun it as a defeat, and broke the will of Americans to press on to finish the job. The MSM is now attempting the same bit of deception to further build the perception that we're losing in Iraq.
Of course, the current increase in violence in Iraq is curiously occurring in the final days of the mid-term election campaigns in the US. A coincidence? I don't think so. We should give Pres. Bush's policies credit for the fact that the terrorists are trying to influence our elections by perpetrating violence half a world away, rather than blowing up a commuter train here, like they did in Spain.
There was
a post about the reality of the Tet offensive, and the media spin put on it, placed on FreeRepublic last night by a Marine veteran who was involved in combat against the NVA during Tet. His perspective is worth reading:
I witnessed and fought in the original Tet Offensive mostly in and around Hue City--the old Imperial Capital. I was with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. It was a block-by-block, house-by-house fight. There was something like 12,000, heavily armed, well trained and equipped North Vietnamese troops in the city when we got there. They had ringed the city with antiaircraft guns and even had some tanks but they were destroyed quickly by helicopter gunships. We had to call for 3.5-inch rocket launchers--which were delivered to us--because the lighter LAAWs we had been issued would not penetrate the concrete buildings in Hue. Things got ugly but there was also an air of exhilaration because we realized we were fighting the big battle that could turn the tide of the war. Saigon and Khe Sanh were experiencing the same type of big formation battles. In spite of severe damage to the ancient city, we destroyed most of the NVA forces in Hue and chased the rest out into the countryside.
I began talking one morning on a street in Hue to a United Press International correspondent named Al Webb. I had just received some newspaper clippings from the states that cast a gloomy light on our efforts. I asked Webb, "Do people in the states really think we are getting our a** kicked?" You couldn't walk down the street we were on for 10 feet without having to step over a dead NVA soldier. "Well," said Webb,"That's the view of some of them."
Tet was a communist miscalculation based on the doctrine of Mao and later Fidel Castro that called for guerrilla forces to capture the countryside and finally move on the cities where the residents would rise up against the government and join the guerrillas in a final battle against the oppressers. This whole plan fell apart when the South Vietnamese refused to join General Giap's offensive.
Tet broke the back of the NVA in South Vietnam and it killed off the last of the armed wing of the Viet Cong. It was a great U.S./RVN victory. Instead it was seen as a quagmire based on the wisdom of a half-educated, functional alcoholic who was CBS's chief copy reader--Walter Cronkite. This was real-time revisionism.
Johnson called a halt to the bombing and said he would not run for re-election. The bombing halt allowed the brutally decimated NVA to replenish, rest and bring in replacements since the trails weren't being bombed. The huge U.S. momentum was allowed to grind to a halt and the White House may as well have hoisted a white flag. That was Tet.