``Washington's goal is to pacify Iraq so as to set up a new pro-Washington Iraqi regime... That's an unattainable goal, but America is run by men and women who think that Washington could and should have won the Vietnam War...'' Yoshie
The focus of this reinterpretation centered on the war's turning point in the Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968. Tet, it was now said, was a resounding military victory for the U.S. and South Vietnamese military forces, which decimated their National Liberation Front attackers....
Yet, in a betrayal of the first order, we are told, it was turned into a defeat by the U.S. media and a vocal minority of war protestors... (Quoted)
-------
Fuck these guys. Even if it's boring to go over old ground, the constant drone of revisitionist histories, particular those of Vietnam need to be addressed.
What the US revisionist experts ignore is that while the US military did stop Tet, inflicted crippling casualties, and drove back the Communist forces---all victories in military terms---Tet was a devastating, irreversible, and stunning political defeat of the US and its puppet regime. By the end of March three months later, Westmoreland was out of a field command, kicked upstairs to Army Chief of Staff, McNamara was sent to the World Bank, Johnson announced no second term and took the North Vietnamese offer to open negotiations in Paris.
These consequences were not the result of the media and protest. They were the result of Tet.
It was evident to the Johnson architects of the war that if the North could mount a country wide assault and nearly take down the whole South at once, they would certainly try it again. Tet made the idea of Tet a reality, and the reality of Tet was that no matter how long the US fought, no matter how many US troops were in country, no matter how much bombing and no matter how secure the US position claimed---all of that could be swept away and would be again some day.
The revisionists make no mention that Tet was launched at the peak of US military strength after six full years of war the last three years of massive escalation under Westmoreland's war of attrition that stationed nearly half a million US military in South Vietnam.
By the end of 1967 Vietnam had used up 841,264 draftees and the January 1968 draft call was for 33,000 more (I was scheduled to be one of these). Operation Rolling Thunder (B-52 bombing) begun in 1965 was at full strength running daily missions in North Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and Cambodia---from the northern Mu Gia pass (border between North Vietnam and Laos), down passed the DMZ, the Khe Santh valley, and south where it branched in Cambodia to supply the Central Highlands and the Saigon region (III Corps).
The NVA and Viet Cong in III Corps were also supplied directly through Cambodia from the port at Sihanoukville. Nixon would later focus his Cambodian invasion on this route. Despite three years of bombing missions in the northern Ho Chi Minh trail and the US defence of Khe Santh, the NVA and VC took Hue which was 50k East of Khe Santh and held it for three weeks. The US had to destroy Hue to save it. 90,000 of the 140,000 inhabitants of Hue were made refugees. (Think Fallujah)
The North's strategy to thin out US defence of the South and prepare for Tet involved the ruse of large and costly attacks near Khe Sanh to lure Westmoreland into focusing attention, troops, and support in the north near the DMZ (I Corps). For weeks the US press covered these battles. Khe Sanh was reinforced with air resupply from Da Nang and there were heroic stories of US Marines holding their fortified base against heavy odds. The illusion that the NVA was engaged in major activity in I Corps was a success.
``[early January `68]..Weyand started with Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland's deputy... Abrams listened.. and took him into Westmoreland's office. Weyand laid out his intelligence once more for the commanding general and summed up at the map. `I can see these guys moving inward. They're not staying in their base areas,' he said. His hand was up along the Cambodian border. `We're going to be in the base areas and they're going to be down here somewhere.' He pointed to the Saigon-Bien Hoa area. `I don't know what they've got in mind, but there's an attack coming.' Weyand wanted to postpone the opening of the whole 1968 campaign plan in III Corps.
...Weyand had amassed a lot of evidence, and he was asking Westmoreland to postpone, not to cancel. Westmoreland agreed. He thought he had a bigger worry of his own at the moment. The Vietnamese Communists seemed to be attempting to achieve a second Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh...
...As January lengthened and the forays from the base [Khe Sanh] encountered more and more resistance from the NVA closing in...Westmoreland ordered the entire Air Cav division to shift from the Central Coast to northern I Corps. ...By the end of January he had concentrated in I Corps, if one counted the Marines, 40 percent of all infantry and armor battalions he had...'' (A Bright Shining Lie, Sheehan N., 703-705p)
When Tet started January 31st with the major NVA force in III Corps aimed at the Bien Hoa-Saigon area, the Khe Sanh siege was relatively quiet under routine shelling. Meanwhile over the entire length of South Vietnam...
``Military camps and command posts, police stations, administrative headquarters, prisons, and radio stations in more than half of the forty-four province capitals and in all of the autonomous cities in the country were under assault in the predawn hours of January 31, 1968, or were soon to be hit. Scores of district centers and ARVN bases in the countryside were being struck. Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa, and a number other air bases were under ground attack or shelling to try to prevent air support or helicopter reinforcements for endangered garrisons.
In Saigon, the Viet Cong were also attempting to seize Independence Palace..., the Navy headquarters, the Joint General Staff compound, and the radio station...the Communist troops were generally seeking to bypass the Americans and to concentrate on their Saigonese allies. The goal was to collapse the Saigon regime...'' (ABSL, 711p)
The North on later reflection must have realized that even without the mass insurrection they had counted on to carry Tet to victory, they had almost succeeded. It was a mistake to count on a mass uprising, and it wasn't a mistake they made again.
But Tet had won political ground that could never be retaken. The North had exposed the Saigon government and ARVN as a sham and delivered a stunning psychological defeat to US political delusion that winning Vietnam was just around the corner.
The US military controlled exactly where they were standing and nothing else. Westmoreland had moved the bulk of US combat forces out of III Corps, and there was mostly US staff and support units in the capital when Tet started. ARVN had been given control of defences of Saigon by Westmoreland in December. Weyand's insistance that some US combat units in III Corps reserved for a US planned offensive in base areas near Cambodia remain behind probably saved Saigon from being overrun entirely.
The US counter-offensive to Tet took a tremendous toll:
``Serious fighting went on in Saigon for two weeks... `Although no accurate statistics are available,' the official ARVN history said of the toll throughout South Vietnam, `there were approximate 14,300 [civilians] killed, 24,000 wounded, 72,000 homes destroyed, and 627,000 persons made homeless.' In Saigon and its suburbs, approximate 6,300 civilians died, 11,000 were wounded, 206,000 became refugees, and 19,000 houses were smashed...'' (719-20p)
The US in Iraq like the US in Vietnam has no sustainable political strategy because there is no such thing. To stand firm and announce that we are staying the course assumes there is a course, which is to say there is a sustainable political strategy. Since there is no strategy there is no course.
The justifications for the occupation of Iraq drift with the wind.
Which course are we staying this week? I've forgotten.
CG