Original Post
My Comment:
The Economist.com piece misses the point Bush was trying to make when he compared the current situation in Iraq to the Tet offensive. In the mythology of the American right, the Tet offensive means something completely different from Economist.com's definition of "A period when many concluded (correctly) that American troops and their local allies would eventually fail in Vietnam."
When he compares October in Iraq to the Tet offensive, Bush is trying to say the insurgency is in its dying throes, taking heavy, unsustainable losses. He thinks the rise in deaths is simply a propoganda effort by the insurgents. He's saying that Americans should not turn against the war like they did in Vietnam. He's saying that victory is within America's grasp if only voters find the moral courage to prevent liberals and congressional Democrats from stabbing the war effort it in the back.
The right believes that the Tet offensive represents the moment when American public opinion about the war became completely detached from the reality of the situation on the ground in Vietnam. They think the American people were simply wrong in their assessment of the war as unwinnable. Under Bush's analogy, if the American people turn against the Iraq war now, they will repeat their mistake of 1968, betraying the war effort on the eve of victory. According to the right-wing narrative, the "fact" that the Tet offensive was a tactical victory for the U.S. just goes to show how the war effort was stabbed in the back by eroding support on the home front.
The perception of the Tet offensive as an American "victory" shows just how perverse and unrealistic the American obsession with body counts and trying to kill all the Communists really was. The N. Vietnamese/Vietcong body count in the battle was irrelevent to the outcome of the war. What was important was the perception. The Tet offesive, especially the attack on the embassy, showed just how vulnerable America was. It showed that the U.S. was not going to win easily, and since the U.S. was not willing to win "the hard way," (huge numbers of troops, economic mobilization, nuclear weapons) it meant America would eventually go down to defeat.
Americans who turned against the war after Tet were not stupid or foolish; it was they who recognized the facts on the ground, not the right. They saw that the U.S. could not win against an enemy so determined that it would accept enormous casualties to achieve psychological, propoganda, and minor tactical victories.
The right is correct to argue that the U.S. could have won in Vietnam. Sure it could have - if America was willing to send hundreds of thousands more troops, fully mobilize its society, and utilize its arsenal of nuclear weapons, no country the size of Vietnam could stand in its way. But that's where the right misses the point.
The objective of Vietnam - like that of Iraq - was to win cheaply and easily. Of course, every political and military leader going into a war wants to win quickly and easily. But going to war with that expectation - and an unwillingness or inability to step up the effort - is the height of arrogance and stupidity. Such unrealistic expectations demonstrate the failure of leadership. No smart leader should go to war without thinking it is crucial to do so. A President who is not willing to do whatever it takes to win the war he is fighting should not be fighting it. If you're not willing to do whatever it takes, how important can it really be?
There's a reason why modern war is supposed to be the last resort - desperation allows you to unleash your full potential and fight with full resolve. The Tet offensive exposed the difference in resolve between the two sides. The Vietnamese were willing to do anything for a chance at victory. The Americans were willing to send thousands of poor and minority draftees to die in the jungle to prolong the life of a failed experiment for a few years. After Tet, the American people saw what it would take to win the war, and realized they had been lied to. The war couldn't be won by a few hundred thousand relatively untrained and socioeconomically disadvantaged draftees. It would require some effort. It was not going to be easy.
Neither is Iraq. Bush's greatest failure in the lead-up to the war wasn't the weapons of destruction mess or the lack of an exit strategy or even the total disregard for the idea or war as a last resort. No, it was his inability to convince even himself that this war was important enough to fight correctly: with overwhelming force, clear objectives, and a commitment to get it right. The American people are right to ask, as they did in 1968: "If the enemy wants to win so much more than our government does - if they have so much more will to fight - if they are making sacrifices our government never even asked us to make - why are we wasting our time, our money, and our soldiers' lives?"
