October 19, 2006
The Tet offensive revisited
So President Bush has finally acknowledged the ghost of Vietnam. In a television interview, he talked about the parallel between the current surge of bloodshed in Iraq and the Tet offensive of 1968, which did so much to turn America against the Vietnam war.
This may sounds like defeatism. But, in fact, Bush is making a quite different point. The conservative analysis of the Tet offensive is that militarily it was a disaster for the Vietcong, who were killed in large numbers as they came out into the open to attack American targets. But Tet became a broader success for the Vietcong, because it helped to convince the American public that they were losing the war - and so set the stage for withdrawal. The sight of the US embassy in Saigon under attack convinced Americans that after four years of war, they were going backwards.
Even at the time, General Westmoreland the head of the American military in Vietnam attempted to argue that Tet was actually a success for the United States military effort. But he was greeted with derision at home. Art Buchwald, a humourist, summed up the general reaction with a column headlined - "We have the Sioux on the run, says General Custer."
By using the Tet offensive parallel, Bush is acknowledging the point that a war can be won on the battlefield - but lost if the American public lose heart.
But - thinking through the parallels - I don’t think they really work. It seems to me that the military situation is actually worse in Iraq than it was in Vietnam. Yes - American casualties are much lower than in Vietnam where over 60,000 were killed. But America has much less of a semblance of control over the battlefield. When James Baker’s Iraq Study Group - which is investigating policy options - recently visited Baghdad, only one of the party of 12 felt able to venture out of the fortified "Green Zone" in the centre of the city.
However, if the military situation is worse in Iraq than Vietnam, the state of public opinion is less fevered back in the United States. None of the main presidential election candidates is yet running on an anti-war platform - as Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy did in 1968. There are no huge anti-war marches. This is largely, I think, because there is no compulsory draft, threatening the drag the children of the middle-classes off to die on some foreign battlefield.
The lack of a draft means that public opinion is less fevered than during Vietnam. But the lack of draft may also be part of the reason why the military situation is worse in Iraq than Vietnam. As everybody now acknowledges, there are simply not enough American troops to keep order.
And even if there are no massive peace marches wending their way through Washington, a huge Republican defeat in the mid-term elections next month, could serve as a similar signal that the American public has lost heart over Iraq.
Do not expect a quick withdrawal, however. It took over four years between the Tet offensive and the final conclusion of a peace treaty with North Vietnam in January 1973. Two years later, in the absence of American troops, North Vietnamese troops over-ran the South - and the world saw the iconic images of American helicopters lifting people off the roof of the embassy in Saigon. Come to think of it, America is currently building a huge new embassy in Baghdad. I hope somebody has remembered to give it a decent helicopter landing-pad.
