Some folks compare Iraq to Vietnam. But foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, who reported on both wars, says most of the analogies drawn between the two conflicts are false, except for one: “Iraq will only be another Vietnam if the home front collapses, as it did following the Tet offensive.”
The 1968 Tet Offensive was a massive military defeat for the enemy. They lost 50,000 killed and about as many wounded. But pictures of a bloodied U.S. embassy in Saigon, together with shoddy media analysis, made it appear that the offensive was a defeat for the U.S.
In fact, nearly every major victory by our forces from then on somehow got twisted as evidence of our failure in Vietnam and fueled the anti-war movement. And the enemy was listening.
Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army, told the Wall Street Journal after his retirement in 1995 that such distortions were essential to their strategy: “Every day our leadership would… follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.”
America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin because it “lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.”
And that’s the Asman Observer.
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