Posted on 09/02/2009 10:46:41 AM PDT by NewMediaJournal
I have a good friend who fought in the 1968 Vietnam Tet Offensive. He talks about how, in the battle’s aftermath, he and his buddies patrolled the streets of Hue City, site of some of the most intensive fighting. He describes walking on the bodies of dead North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers piled several layers high in the strategic provincial capital, and is also quick to remind me that Tet was a stunning military victory for the United States; that in fact, the US did not lose a single military encounter for the rest of the war. Yet, most Americans at the time saw Tet as a defeat, and it was a turning point in America’s resolve to continuing pressing the war in Southeast Asia.
In part, this was due to what is now accepted as uniformly distorted coverage by the US media; but while that coverage was critical to the enemy’s success, it was not the most critical factor. The real problem, my friend said, was that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson even several years into the war continued to give the public overly optimistic, often inaccurate information, leading it to believe that the enemy was incapable of launching such an offensive. Thus, according to the late Peter Braestrup, the administration’s reaction to Tet was, “defensive” and Johnson “psychologically defeated [by] the onslaught on the cities of Vietnam.”
Switch to today. Is the United States just one “Tet” away from the same thing happening to the war in Afghanistan?
(Excerpt) Read more at newmediajournal.us ...
The release of the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004 was a turning point in the war in Iraq (vs. the Iraq War; which took down Saddam).
Public support waned, the terrorists were emboldened, and the media hyped the story to try to force Bush out of office (The New York Times had Abu Ghraib on the front page for 30 consecutive days).
The photos were leaked by an uncle of one of the men being prosecuted who was seeking a plea bargain in exchange for not releasing the photos. That is blackmail and extortion and treason. All crimes should have been prosecuted.
The drumbeat was that Viet Nam was unwinnable, this despite as the article says, the fact that we never lost a battle.
At the end, with the peace agreement signed, we had effectively won the war. All that remained was for us to maintain the peace. We walked away, and the result was communist governments throughout the region, and several million people slaughtered by their new overlords.
It’s a quagmire. What would victory look like anyway? Is there an exit strategy?
If you can’t win a war even though you never lose any battles, what does that tell you?
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