Posted on 08/22/2005 8:05:13 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
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.
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(Arnaud de Borchgrave covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam between 1951 under the French and 1972.)
Yes, I know this is an old article, but the Left is using the same old tricks they used in Vietnam, and the more we point it out, the better.
I don't think it is really accurate to say the home front collapsed after Tet. It may have among media elitists, but it didn't among what Nixon called the silent majority. A couple of facts bear this out. First, after Tet, we continued to fight in Vietnam for another 5 years. And second, when an election was held on McGovern's 'Peace at Any Price Policy' towards Vietnam, McGovern suffered one of the worst presidential electoral defeats in American history. That is hardly the stuff of a home front collapse.
What actually led to the collapse in support for the South Vietnamese was Watergate. But for Watergate, there probably would still be a South Vietnam
And the media never bothers to think about the thousands slaughtered after they handed vistory to the north
Good point.
It explains why the MSM keeps trying to manufacture scandals to hang around Dubya's neck.
Nah. Granted all the stuff about the press and the left's efforts to impede the war are true. But, realistically, the war was a doomed effort from the beginning for a number of reasons.I will not get into a long treatise on it. But I lived through that period & narrowly avoided the service and being there.
Let me just say this. My father (USMC) commanded a company in Korea and in 1963 was in Nam as an advisor, when our presence was basically just the Marines. He came home and said to me that we were getting into a war that we could not win and would become a huge mess (he said this for a variety of reasons). He knew what he was talking about. He was a true patriot and staunch conservative.
I don't know why you would say the Vietnamese War was a doomed effort. The war had basically been won by our side by 1973. At that point, the South Vietnamese were able to fight on their own without American ground troops supporting them and to defeat the NVA in stand-up battles. In fact, during the NVA's 1972 Easter Offensive, ARVN carried out a pretty decisive counterattack which recaptured almost all of the territory the NVA had grabbed in the initial offensive. In fact, the counteroffensive was so decisive and resulted in such losses for the NVA that the NVA wasn't able to carry out another attack for 3 years. When that next attack occurred however, ARVN collapsed because we had cutoff all of the supplies to the South Vietnamese which they needed in order to defend themselves against the Soviet and Chicom supplied North Vietnamese. So to say that South Vietnam was doomed from the get-go is just not accurate.
What would he have said about Iraq?
There are rumors that Al-Queda is planning a Tet-like operation around Ramadan in Iraq.
That's in September. We'll see how this plays out.
And they received a big hand from John Kerry, and I have researched this in the FBI files concerning John Kerry and the VVAW, to read more go to my about me page here on FR.
Has John Fraud Kerry signed the SF-180 yet?
Or is his staff still infinitely reviewing it?
You just know that's their plan. That was Osama bin Laden's plan from the very beginning, he just thought we'd fold long before now.
I pray that we hold the course. If we do not, the Left will have succeeded in wasting the lives and sacrifices of all the soldiers we sent there, just like they did in Vietnam.
>>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.
It's worth noting that they did it with a fresh influx of Soviet tanks and other armaments, in a conventional armored campaign, at a time when the Dems in Congress pretty much totally repudiated our promises to the RVN government for material assistance.
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