LIKE VIETNAM WITHOUT THE QUAGMIRE (via John Resnick):

Analysis: A mini-Tet offensive in Iraq? (Arnaud de Borchgrave, 4/6/2004, UPI)

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.

People seem terribly upset with the Democrats for comparing Iraq to Vietnam. Hard to see why--the comparison seems quite apt in important aspects.

Both were unnecessary but honorable wars in which our military victory in the field was inevitable. The danger in both wars was/is on the domestic front. It is an extraordinarily unusual thing in human affairs for the people of one country to fight and die for nothing more than the freedom of the people of another country. Any such endeavor can never enjoy better than tenuous support from the citizenry that is being asked to wage war for altruistic purposes. This provides a wide opening for either party to exploit and, if they're willing to do considerable damage to our national unity and international prestige, it's fairly easy to so divide the country as to make the war not worth waging, never mind winning.

Here though we arrive at the important differences between Iraq and Vietnam. The first is that we have a set withdrawal date. It is later than it should have been, but not too late. Second, the Shi'ites would seem better prepared to take over upon our departure than were the South Vietnamese, whose politics we'd made such a hash of after over a decade of meddling that many of the natives had lost confidence in their capacity to govern themselves and to resist the North. One doubts the Shi'ites of Iraq will be reluctant to put down the Sunni and establish a vibrant state of their own after centuries of oppression.

What this means for George W. Bush is that even if Mr. Kerry and the Democrats turn the nation against the war it just won't matter much. We'll draw down this Summer either way and Iraq will play hardly any role in the election. All that will matter is the economy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2004 5:01 PM