From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Iraq: Another Vietnam?
The truth about the Tet offensive is that we won.
Suddenly the historical debate over Vietnam is sprouting all through the current debate over Iraq. Howard Dean, leading the Democratic pack, told Dan Rather: "We sent troops to Vietnam, without understanding why we were there. And the American people weren't told the truth and it was a disaster. And Iraq is gonna become a disaster under this presidency."
With other would-be Democratic presidents joining this assault, it might be helpful to review what happened in Vietnam. Especially what happened at the Tet offensive, like the car bombings in Baghdad timed at the start of a religious holiday. In what sense should we fear that Iraq is "another Vietnam"?
Well, first of all, the Tet offensive was a militarily significant effort, not four truck bombs. After erosion of their position during 1967, the Communists threw all of their South Vietnam guerrilla forces into attacks in more than 100 cities across the length and breadth of the country. Most spectacularly, since it came before the eyes of the Saigon press corps, a 19-man sapper squad penetrated the U.S. Embassy compound. They failed to enter the chancery building, despite early reports, and the last of them was killed or repulsed after a six-hour battle.
General William Westmoreland appeared in the shattered compound to proclaim a great victory. His televised appearance came against a backdrop of destruction throughout the country, and the American elite decided to believe not the general but their own eyes. A widely cited Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed that "the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed, it may be falling apart beneath our feet." Walter Cronkite turned against the war, editorializing on the need for negotiation. With this home-front reaction, Tet was the turning-point in the war, the anvil of Communist victory and American defeat.
Yet in fact, Westmoreland was right, subsequent analysts have uniformly concluded. The Communist offensive was decisively repulsed. There was no general uprising in favor of the North. The South Vietnamese army did not buckle, though operating at 50% strength because of imprudent holiday leaves. The indigenous Viet Cong were destroyed, leaving the rest of the war to be conducted by troops recruited in the North.
"To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other--in a major crisis abroad--cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism," Peter Braestrup wrote in his book "Big Story." He was Washington Post Saigon bureau chief during Tet, and his critique didn't provoke serious controversy even within the press corps.
Tet was a military victory turned into a psychological defeat on the home front. Shall we do it again in Iraq?
Tet represents another, less widely understood, turning point in the Vietnam War. Soon after the offensive, Gen. Westmoreland was replaced as the U.S. commander by Creighton W. Abrams, with a notable change in U.S. strategy and tactics. The contrast of the two eras is pregnant with lessons for the far smaller guerrilla war in Iraq.
"More troops" was Gen. Westmoreland's first request from Vietnam, and also his last one. He sought to take the battle to the enemy, with "search and destroy" missions intended to find the major enemy units hiding in the jungle hills. It was a war of attrition, using superior U.S. firepower to destroy the enemy's forces faster than he could replace them. But the scale of the Tet assaults was scarcely encouraging.
Under Gen. Abrams, "search and destroy" was replaced by "clear and hold." This is recorded in "A Better War," by Lewis Sorley, who notes that most of the histories of Vietnam pretty much skip the post-1968 period. Abrams put emphasis not on attrition but on the security of the local population, and the training of the South Vietnamese who would continue the fighting as Americans left.
The success of these programs was tested by the Easter Offensive of 1972. Some 200,000 North Vietnamese troops attacked on three fronts. U.S. ground troop withdrawals continued as scheduled, but President Nixon ordered heavy air and naval retaliation, including the mining of North Vietnamese ports. With this air support, the South Vietnamese army repelled the invasion. The North Vietnamese lost half of their attacking force and half of their tanks and artillery. The legendary Vo Nguyen Giap was quietly removed from command of the Northern armies.
Three years later the North had recovered sufficient strength to repeat the offensive. But by then the Paris peace accords had been signed, with U.S. prisoners returned at the cost of allowing Hanoi to infiltrate military units in the south. With Watergate, Congress had passed the Case-Church Amendment forbidding military involvement in Southeast Asia. Sen. Edward Kennedy passed a $266 million cut in supplemental spending for Vietnam, and funds were slashed for the coming year. Counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson remarked, "perhaps the major lesson of the Vietnam War is: do not rely on the United States as an ally."
This time the South Vietnamese got no assistance from the U.S. and fell before an assault by 20 tank-led divisions. Some million refugees took to the seas as "the boat people." After the loss of Iran and some trying times in Europe, the U.S. elected Ronald Reagan, who revived the American military and faced the Communists down at Reykjavik. The Communist empire fell after all, and Vietnam goes down as a lost battle in a successful campaign.
Yet something more than a lost battle, a self-inflicted wound arising from an essentially dishonorable strain of American neurosis. Yes, by all means, don't do it again in Iraq. As Gov. Dean says, the first step is to tell the truth, starting with the truth of what happened in Vietnam.
Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
