In the course of Tet 1968, North Vietnamese, American and South Vietnamese forces all suffered tactical defeat and achieved tactical victories; that's usually the case in every military campaign. At the operational level, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) suffered a terrible defeat. As NVA regiments emerged from jungle-covered enclaves and massed for attack, they exposed themselves to the firepower of U.S. aircraft and artillery. The NVA units temporarily seized many cities at the cost of extremely heavy casualties.
However, Tet achieved the grand political ends North Vietnam sought. Tet was a strategic psychological attack launched in a presidential election year during a primary season featuring media-savvy "peace" candidates. "Peace" in this context must be italicized with determined irony; in the historical lens it requires an insistent blindness steeled by Stalinist mendacity to confuse the results of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (e.g., Cambodia's genocide) with any honest interpretation of peace.
Reflecting on Tet in a 1989 interview with CBS News' Morley Safer, NVA commander General Vo Nguyen Giap said: "The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion." He added: "Military power is not the decisive factor in war. Human beings! Human beings are the decisive factor."
Bay could be right. But then, I've worried for the past 2-1/2 years that the enemy would try to pull a Tet on us. Or a "Bulge" (1944 German counter-attack in the Ardennes). But they haven't. If they could have, wouldn't they have done something that dramatic already at any of a number of crucial elections or votes in Congress? Even though it makes sense that our enemies will try a counter-attack that seeks to reverse their looming defeat in Iraq with a desperate gamble, can they?
Back in August, I wondered if we were too spooked about another Tet. I cited a fall 2006 post of mine on the subject:
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 Viet Cong 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.
I know that an aging Giap claimed that all along they were aiming at our home morale, but my reading of the history is that the North Vietnamese were aiming at breaking South Vietnamese morale. The heavy losses were accepted because they thought they'd crack the South Vietnamese by the shock of the wide offensive.
Might the aging communist have tried to rewrite history to make himself look like a tremendously deep strategist rather than the guy that got whipped and then got lucky? Losing nearly half of your force as killed or captured wouldn't exactly cover you with glory if you admit you won only because you got lucky.
Yet today, there is no chance that the enemy in Iraq could orchestrate an attack that might actually accomplish something on its own. The enemy has been atomized for so long that I don't see how they could emulate the North Vietnamese who maneuvered batalions and regiments on the battlefield. The enemy, if they try a Tet strategy, will aim to have the home front impact of a major military offensive without the actual military offensive that was part of the 1968 Tet. Bay recognizes this reality even as he warns the enemy will do something:
Actually executing a genuine Giap Tet-type offensive in Iraq, however, borders on fantasy. On a daily basis Iraq's assorted terrorist organizations and militia gangs want to cause such system-shaking, simultaneous carnage, but they don't because, well, they can't. A Giap Tet requires a level of coordination the terrorists have never exhibited because they simply don't have it. It requires internal Iraqi political support that the terror cadres and militias lack; fear is not a political program.
If the enemy strings together some extra car bombs, some high-casualty strikes on civilian targets, maybe a foot attack that penetrates the Green Zone, and some scary ass videos with masked thugs screaming "Death to America! Yadda, yadda, yadda" (hey, the Hollywood writers strike is hitting everyone), I think our home morale will withstand the uptick in casualties and the television pictures.
I think if the enemy exposes themselves to carry out such a Tet, that we will take advantage of their folly and wipe them off the floor. We won't lose 2000 KIA and neither will the Iraqi security forces. And remember, in 1968 we didn't have precision munitions and high levels of surveillance over the battlefield. Still, the enemy won't lose 38,000 for the simple reason that they don't have anywhere near that many thugs in the street.
Tet 2008 will be no more Tet than Woodstock 1999 was Woodstock. Bummer, huh?
