Here is an interesting analysis from a man who knows the Tet Offensive better than most people. Hopefully everyone will get something out of this.
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/index.html
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID...06-032203-3282r
Analysis: A mini-Tet offensive in Iraq?
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Published 4/6/2004 4:12 PM
WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- Any seasoned reporter covering the Tet
offensive in Vietnam 36 years ago is well over 60 and presumably
retired or teaching journalism is one of America's 4,200 colleges and
universities. Before plunging into an orgy of erroneous and invidious
historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, a reminder about what
led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely.
Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it
did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve of the Chinese
New Year, Jan. 31, 1968. The surprise attack was designed to overwhelm
some 70 cities and towns, and 30 other strategic objectives
simultaneously. By breaking a previously agreed truce for Tet
festivities, master strategist Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi calculated
that South Vietnamese troops would be caught with defenses down.
After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese troops reacted
fiercely. They did the bulk of the fighting and took some 6,000
casualties. Vietcong units not only did not reach a single one of their
objectives -- except when they arrived by taxi at the U.S. Embassy in
Saigon, blew their way through the wall into the compound and guns
blazing made it into the lobby before they were wiped out by U.S.
Marines -- but they lost some 50,000 killed and at least that many
wounded. Giap had thrown some 70,000 troops into a strategic gamble
that was also designed to overwhelm 13 of the 16 provincial capitals
and trigger a popular uprising. But Tet was an unmitigated military
disaster for Hanoi and its Vietcong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that
was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the
world. It was television's first war. And some 50 million Americans at
home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans
running around.
As the late veteran war reporter Peter Braestrup documented in "Big
Story" -- a massive, two-volume study of how Tet was covered by
American reporters -- the Vietcong offensive was depicted as a military
disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or
two later from RAND Corp. interrogations of prisoners and defectors,
the damage had been done. Conventional media wisdom had been set in
concrete. Public opinion perceptions in the United States changed
accordingly.
RAND made copies of these POW interrogations available. But few
reporters seemed interested. In fact, the room where they were on
display was almost always empty. Many Vietnamese civilians who were
fence sitters or leaning toward the Vietcong, especially in the region
around Hue City, joined government ranks after they witnessed Vietcong
atrocities. Several mass graves were found with some 4,000 unarmed
civil servants and other civilians, stabbed or with skulls smashed by
clubs. The number of communist defectors, known as "chieu hoi,"
increased fourfold. And the "popular uprising" anticipated by Giap,
failed to materialize. The Tet offensive also neutralized much of the
clandestine communist infrastructure.
As South Vietnamese troops fought Vietcong remnants in Cholon, the
predominantly Chinese twin city of Saigon, reporters, sipping drinks in
the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2 miles
away. America's most trusted newsman, CBS' Walter Cronkite, appeared
for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop. Donning helmet,
Cronkite declared the war lost. It was this now famous television news
piece that persuaded President Johnson six weeks later, on March 31,
not to run. His ratings had plummeted from 80 percent when he assumed
the presidency upon Kennedy's death to 30 percent after Tet. His
handling of the war dropped to 20 percent, his credibility shot to
pieces.
Until Tet, a majority of Americans agreed with Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson that failure was not an option. It was Kennedy who changed the
status of U.S. military personnel from advisers to South Vietnamese
troops to full-fledged fighting men. By the time of Kennedy's
assassination in Nov. 22, 1963, 16,500 U.S. troops had been committed
to the war. Johnson escalated all the way to 542,000. But defeat became
an option when Johnson decided the war was unwinnable and that he would
lose his bid for the presidency in November 1968. Hanoi thus turned
military defeat into a priceless geopolitical victory.
With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese
regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos and
Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that
news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that
ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called
a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because
America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory
was within Hanoi's grasp.
Hanoi's Easter offensive in March 1972 was another disaster for the
communists. Some 70,000 North Vietnamese troops were wiped out -- by
the South Vietnamese who did all the fighting. The last American
soldier left Vietnam in March 1973. And the chances of the South
Vietnamese army being able to hack it on its own were reasonably good.
With one proviso: Continued U.S. military assistance with weapons and
hardware, including helicopters. But Congress balked, first by cutting
off military assistance to Cambodia, which enabled Pol Pot's Khmer
Rouge communists to take over, which, in turn, was followed by a
similar Congressional rug pulling from under the South Vietnamese, that
led to rapid collapse of morale in Saigon.
The unraveling, with Congress pulling the string, was so rapid that
even Giap was caught by surprise. As he recounts in his memoirs, Hanoi
had to improvise a general offensive -- and then rolled into Saigon two
years before they had reckoned it might become possible.
That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment to Iraq. Whatever one
thought about the advisability of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United
States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid commitment to endow
Iraq with a democratic system of government. While failure is not an
option for Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who
called Iraq the president's Vietnam. It is, of course, no such animal.
But it could become so if Congressional resolve dissolves.
Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army,
received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In
an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made
clear the anti-war movement in the United States, which led to the
collapse of political will in Washington, was "essential to our
strategy."
Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark
and various church ministers "gave us confidence that we should hold on
in the face of battlefield reverses."
America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin, "because of its democracy.
Through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to
win." Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the war of his brother
who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the Cold War and Nikita
Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would behoove Kennedy to
see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring democracy, not
only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East.
-0-
(Arnaud de Borchgrave covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign
correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam between 1951 under the
French and 1972.)
Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/index.html
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID...06-032203-3282r
Analysis: A mini-Tet offensive in Iraq?
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Published 4/6/2004 4:12 PM
WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- Any seasoned reporter covering the Tet
offensive in Vietnam 36 years ago is well over 60 and presumably
retired or teaching journalism is one of America's 4,200 colleges and
universities. Before plunging into an orgy of erroneous and invidious
historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, a reminder about what
led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely.
Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it
did following the Tet offensive, which began on the eve of the Chinese
New Year, Jan. 31, 1968. The surprise attack was designed to overwhelm
some 70 cities and towns, and 30 other strategic objectives
simultaneously. By breaking a previously agreed truce for Tet
festivities, master strategist Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi calculated
that South Vietnamese troops would be caught with defenses down.
After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese troops reacted
fiercely. They did the bulk of the fighting and took some 6,000
casualties. Vietcong units not only did not reach a single one of their
objectives -- except when they arrived by taxi at the U.S. Embassy in
Saigon, blew their way through the wall into the compound and guns
blazing made it into the lobby before they were wiped out by U.S.
Marines -- but they lost some 50,000 killed and at least that many
wounded. Giap had thrown some 70,000 troops into a strategic gamble
that was also designed to overwhelm 13 of the 16 provincial capitals
and trigger a popular uprising. But Tet was an unmitigated military
disaster for Hanoi and its Vietcong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that
was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the
world. It was television's first war. And some 50 million Americans at
home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans
running around.
As the late veteran war reporter Peter Braestrup documented in "Big
Story" -- a massive, two-volume study of how Tet was covered by
American reporters -- the Vietcong offensive was depicted as a military
disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or
two later from RAND Corp. interrogations of prisoners and defectors,
the damage had been done. Conventional media wisdom had been set in
concrete. Public opinion perceptions in the United States changed
accordingly.
RAND made copies of these POW interrogations available. But few
reporters seemed interested. In fact, the room where they were on
display was almost always empty. Many Vietnamese civilians who were
fence sitters or leaning toward the Vietcong, especially in the region
around Hue City, joined government ranks after they witnessed Vietcong
atrocities. Several mass graves were found with some 4,000 unarmed
civil servants and other civilians, stabbed or with skulls smashed by
clubs. The number of communist defectors, known as "chieu hoi,"
increased fourfold. And the "popular uprising" anticipated by Giap,
failed to materialize. The Tet offensive also neutralized much of the
clandestine communist infrastructure.
As South Vietnamese troops fought Vietcong remnants in Cholon, the
predominantly Chinese twin city of Saigon, reporters, sipping drinks in
the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2 miles
away. America's most trusted newsman, CBS' Walter Cronkite, appeared
for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop. Donning helmet,
Cronkite declared the war lost. It was this now famous television news
piece that persuaded President Johnson six weeks later, on March 31,
not to run. His ratings had plummeted from 80 percent when he assumed
the presidency upon Kennedy's death to 30 percent after Tet. His
handling of the war dropped to 20 percent, his credibility shot to
pieces.
Until Tet, a majority of Americans agreed with Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson that failure was not an option. It was Kennedy who changed the
status of U.S. military personnel from advisers to South Vietnamese
troops to full-fledged fighting men. By the time of Kennedy's
assassination in Nov. 22, 1963, 16,500 U.S. troops had been committed
to the war. Johnson escalated all the way to 542,000. But defeat became
an option when Johnson decided the war was unwinnable and that he would
lose his bid for the presidency in November 1968. Hanoi thus turned
military defeat into a priceless geopolitical victory.
With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese
regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos and
Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that
news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that
ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called
a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because
America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory
was within Hanoi's grasp.
Hanoi's Easter offensive in March 1972 was another disaster for the
communists. Some 70,000 North Vietnamese troops were wiped out -- by
the South Vietnamese who did all the fighting. The last American
soldier left Vietnam in March 1973. And the chances of the South
Vietnamese army being able to hack it on its own were reasonably good.
With one proviso: Continued U.S. military assistance with weapons and
hardware, including helicopters. But Congress balked, first by cutting
off military assistance to Cambodia, which enabled Pol Pot's Khmer
Rouge communists to take over, which, in turn, was followed by a
similar Congressional rug pulling from under the South Vietnamese, that
led to rapid collapse of morale in Saigon.
The unraveling, with Congress pulling the string, was so rapid that
even Giap was caught by surprise. As he recounts in his memoirs, Hanoi
had to improvise a general offensive -- and then rolled into Saigon two
years before they had reckoned it might become possible.
That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment to Iraq. Whatever one
thought about the advisability of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United
States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid commitment to endow
Iraq with a democratic system of government. While failure is not an
option for Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who
called Iraq the president's Vietnam. It is, of course, no such animal.
But it could become so if Congressional resolve dissolves.
Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army,
received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In
an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made
clear the anti-war movement in the United States, which led to the
collapse of political will in Washington, was "essential to our
strategy."
Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark
and various church ministers "gave us confidence that we should hold on
in the face of battlefield reverses."
America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin, "because of its democracy.
Through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to
win." Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the war of his brother
who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the Cold War and Nikita
Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would behoove Kennedy to
see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring democracy, not
only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East.
-0-
(Arnaud de Borchgrave covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign
correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam between 1951 under the
French and 1972.)
Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International
