Iraq Insurgents Too Weak for Tet

All the talk of whether the Iraqi insurgent and terrorist groups will succeed in doing a "Tet" on us--breaking our morale by increasing attacks and exploiting media coverage to undermine that morale--neglects the fact that the North Vietnamese and VietCong weren't trying to undermine our home morale when they struck in January 1968.

The enemy in Vietnam was trying to win on the battlefield. They struck nationwide (for example, hitting 36 of 43 provincial capitals) in South Vietnam to spark an uprising against the South Vietnamese government. Eighty-four thousand troops were involved in this offensive. Eight enemy battalions occupied Hue and had to be dug out in a month of house-to-house fighting.

The result of the month-long offensive was that South Vietnamese did not rally to the communists, the South Vietnamese army rallied after being taken by surprise, the enemy lost 32,000 KIA and had 6,000 captured by our forces. We lost 2,000 KIA and South Vietnam also lost that amount.

It is only in retrospect that we call Tet a clever enemy victory that played on our home morale. But that was not the plan. The plan was to win on the battlefield by striking hard on a holiday. The target was South Vietnamese morale.

So when today we speak of whether the enemy is pulling a "Tet" on us and whether the prospect of perhaps more than 100 KIA this month indicates the enemy is succeeding in this, consider the vast difference from 1968 to 2006. The enemy isn't even trying to beat us in the field. They aren't trying to beat the Iraqi security forces. And they aren't trying to beat the Iraqi people. They are trying to beat the American people.

So instead of having a major military effort involving maneuvering battalions to strike us that unexpectedly turned into a propaganda victory as Tet was, the al Tet strategy of our enemy is skipping right to the propaganda aspect and we still see just IEDs and scattered small-scale ambushes. It cannot be glorified as an offensive by any stretch of the imagination.

Shouldn't it tell us something that the enemy can't even plan for a military victory and can only go for television victory?

Shouldn't we be ashamed to be a people who our enemies believe can be defeated this way?

Get a grip, people.