"Tet’s Echo and Iraq"
Type: CNAS Commentary
February 1, 2008 — Forty years ago this week – during the Vietnamese Tet holiday in January 1968 – communist forces simultaneously attacked nearly every major military and government installation throughout South Vietnam. From the isolated U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, to the ancient city of Hue, to the U.S. embassy in Saigon, North Vietnamese soldiers and their guerrilla allies surprised the United States and its ally in Saigon, attacking with unprecedented scale and ferocity.
This coordinated assault came to be known as the Tet Offensive, a defining and decisive event in the modern annals of military history. In reality, the Tet Offensive took a harder toll on the north than the south. However, in war, perception is often more important than reality. While the Tet Offensive exacted an enormous cost on the North Vietnamese Army and nearly decimated their Vietcong allies, it inflicted a debilitating psychological shock to the United States from which we never truly recovered.
Some might argue that in an era of precision weapons, “dominant battlespace awareness,” and “shock and awe,” the lessons of the Tet Offensive belong to the yellowed pages of history. In truth, there are vital lessons to be learned from the Tet Offensive, lessons that we ignore in Iraq at our peril. The Tet Offensive proved so important because of the political environment that immediately preceded it. Throughout the autumn of 1967, the White House publically proclaimed a “progress campaign,” a very conscious effort to trumpet the many “successes” that had been achieved in Vietnam, from increasing body counts, decreasing infiltration rates, to the progress in village pacification.
For instance, President Lyndon Johnson told reporters in November: “We are making progress. We are pleased with the results that we are getting.” Vice-President Hubert Humphrey went on NBC’s Today Show and claimed that American was “on the offensive. Territory is being gained. We are making steady progress.” General William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, was emphatically optimistic. “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing… The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt,” he told reporters. He went on to say that he had “never been more encouraged in my four years in Vietnam,” and that American had “reached an important point where the end begins to come into view.”
Today in Iraq, much has been made of the drop in violence associated with the “surge” and the assorted tribal truces the new strategy has helped to consolidate. The reality however, is that the underlying political and security situation is still exceedingly fragile. As America begins to reduce the size of its military presence in Iraq, several growing tensions threaten to renew the simmering civil war: Sunni tribesmen could renew their fight against a Shiite-dominated central government unwilling to meet their demands for political inclusion and employment; the fiery Shiite cleric Muktada al-Sadr could unleash his powerful militia yet again; and many refugees displaced during last year’s violence are returning to find their homes occupied and a government largely unresponsive. The situation in Iraq is still precarious.
Our best and brightest military commanders, who certainly study military history far more avidly than their civilian counterparts, instinctively understand the perils associated with prediction in warfare, and most have learned the bitter lessons of Vietnam. For instance, when pressed to make predictions concerning whether the positive trends seen in Iraq over recent months would continue, General Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq – whose doctoral dissertation explored the history of the Vietnam War – has consistently demurred.
“Take none of this to be optimistic or pessimistic,” Petraeus has warned. “[We] should be realistic at this point, and the reality of Iraq is that it's very hard.” “Nobody in uniform is doing victory dances in the end zone,” he told reporters in December. “We work hard to build up on the progress made” but “we have to be careful not to feel too successful.”
Petraeus’ realism contrasts starkly with the certainty of his Commander-in-Chief, who declared in this week’s State of the Union: “Some may deny the surge is working, but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated.” Earlier this month Bush stated: “There is no doubt in my mind that we will succeed. There is no doubt in my mind when history is written, the final page will say: 'Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world.” And who can forget Vice-President Dick Cheney’s June 2005 statement that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes.”
The real success of the Tet Offensive was not on the urban and rural battlefields of Vietnam, but on the television screens of 1968 America – an America that had been convinced by its political leadership that the tide had been turned, and victory was at hand.
Days after the initial wave of attacks that signaled the start of the Tet Offensive, a February 1968 editorial in the New York Times captured the sense of a nation bewildered: “Swept away in last week’s a hurricane of fire were the rising piles of glowing reports on progress in pacification, retraining of the South Vietnamese army, and the destruction of the enemy’s political and military forces.” Even Walter Cronkite, perhaps the nation’s most trusted figure, is reported to have said: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war.” When Cronkite later declared during his newscast that the war in Vietnam had become unwinnable, a despondent President Lyndon Johnson famously declared to his aides, “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the war!”
Indeed, shortly after the Tet Offensive, General Westmoreland’s request for 100,000 additional American troops was denied, he was replaced, and America began a long, tortuous withdrawal from Vietnam – a departure, and ultimately a defeat, that remains an open wound on America’s psyche.
America must avoid another Tet moment in Iraq. The certainty of the Bush administration’s rhetoric risks raising expectations so high that a particularly shocking political setback or spasm of violence could dramatically accelerate the erosion of what little support is left for America’s war effort.
Perceptions of success and failure have always been an important – sometimes decisive – element of war. For a generation of Americans, the Tet Offensive is remembered as a defining moment in America’s involvement in Vietnam, a psychological turning point from which there was no return.
Forty years after the Tet Offensive, the gunfire still echoes. General Petraeus can hear it –one hopes the White House can too.
Kurt Campbell is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, and Shawn Brimley the Bacevich Fellow, at the Center for a New American Security.
Topic(s): Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime
Project(s): Special Operations Forces
