Austin Bay writes that the embassy protests and murder of our State Department personnel in Benghazi were part of a YouTube-era Tet Offensive to affect public opinion here to undermine our support for newly more open societies in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. I think Bay gives the jihadis too much credit for nuance--and too much credit to Hanoi.
Bay writes, quoting Giap:
North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap launched his 1968 offensive during Vietnam's "Tet" New Year celebrations, but his target was the U.S. election. If the shock of Tet convinced enough Americans that the war was unwinnable, the political repercussions would affect the election and U.S. policy. In a 1989 interview, Giap said his most important fight in 1968 was for American public opinion. Then he added: "Military power is not the decisive factor in war. ... Human beings are the decisive factor."
Human beings remain the decisive factor in the Global War on Terror. Obama tried to scotch the GWOT, preferring "overseas contingency operation," but last week's events demonstrate the struggle continues, with cruel violence and harsh consequences, no matter its name, no matter how hard a president tries to deny it or ignore it.
For militant Islamists, Sept. 11, 2012, was a low-level, YouTube-era Tet designed to bloody America and weaken U.S. support for Libya, Egypt and Tunisia's moderate Islamist governments.
I wouldn't rely on a 1989 quote, as I wrote nearly five years ago when Bay used the same quote to warn about potential enemy moves in Iraq:
My reading of the war holds that Tet was nothing about our home morale. Had we not abandoned South Vietnam in 1974 and 1975, and South Vietnam survived and thrived, nobody would remember Giap's so-called "brilliant" strike at our home morale any more than anybody thinks about Hitler's Ardennes offensive in December 1944 as a brilliant attack that split the Allies and allowed Nazi Germany to survive the war. But since our home morale did decline after Tet and North Vietnam did conquer South Vietnam seven years later, looking back it is easy to see a cause and effect and ascribe that to a deep plan.
It was nothing of the sort. Tet was about South Vietnamese morale and Tet was intended to spark an uprising of the assumed "oppressed" South Vietnamese. We crushed that and two subesequent offensives that year and demonstrated the hollowness of the claim that South Vietnames were eager for Hanoi's "help."
Yet most of my reading on Vietnam was done in college so my understanding may be old. So I pulled out A Better War, a 1999 book by Lewis Sorley that focuses on the post-Tet war, that is sitting on my shelves ... and started reading. My understanding is not obsolete based on newer research. Giap was wrong about strategy, but got lucky. And in 1989 when Bay quotes him, he probably was still fighting foes in Vietnam who believed he sacrificed tens of thousands of NVA soldiers for no good reason.
Remember, Giap lost 43,000 KIA in Tet. In what universe do you launch an offensive designed to affect enemy morale at home and think you are doing fine if you lose 43,000 troops? We at least suffered 2,000 KIA, so the North Vietnamese could point to something achieved. What have the jihadis gotten? Four dead Americans? That's their Tet?
Let's not elevate their primitive barbarity into a strategy. If they are patterning it on an earlier Tet, they're a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
Don't worry about their Tet offensive. Worry about whether we'll keep fighting and keep working the problem of trying to guide countries from autocracy to some semblance of acceptable democracy. We'll have done the enemy's job if we give up on these Arab countries by assuming the Islamists will win.
Work the problems.
