Doug Lorimer
For the first time, the regime in Washington has been forced to directly confront the comparison between its 1960s and 1970s Vietnam War and its current war in Iraq.
In an April 7 congressional debate, Joseph Biden, a senior Democratic Party member of the US Senate foreign relations committee, said that the Iraqi insurrection "reminds me of only one similarity to Vietnam — the Tet offensive". Biden's remark set off a torrent of debate in the US media.
Launched to coincide with Tet Nguyen Dan, the lunar new year holiday, the February 1968 offensive by the Marxist-led Vietnamese resistance movement is widely regarded as the key event which turned US public opinion against Washington's war in Vietnam.
When the Tet offensive was launched, the US had 495,000 troops in South Vietnam, as well as 626,000 troops from the South Vietnamese puppet army and almost 70,000 troops from a small number of US allies.
Resisting them were 250,000 National Liberation Front (NLF) guerrillas and 35,000 regular soldiers from the People's Army of (North) Vietnam. These fighters were based in the countryside, where 80% of South Vietnam's 14 million inhabitants lived.
Despite steadily mounting US casualties — 1864 troops killed between late 1961 and the end of 1965, up to 9378 killed in 1967 — the Pentagon claimed that it was winning the "war against the Viet Cong terrorists".
Weeks later, the NLF conducted co-ordinated assaults in 44 provincial capitals and 64 district capitals across South Vietnam.
In his 1982 book The Endless War: Vietnam's Struggle for Independence, former US Air Force pilot James Harrison wrote: "In a particularly spectacular action on January 31, some n19 [NLF] sappers stormed the US embassy, raising the Viet Cong flag...
"The fall of the [old] imperial capital of Hue to some 7500 Communist troops on January 31, was a still more dramatic demonstration of the continuing strength of the revolutionaries. The city was retaken on February 25, but only after heavy fighting and bombing which cost the lives of 119 United States and 363 [puppet] government soldiers, an estimated 5000 Communist dead, and another 5000-6000 civilians."
The Tet offensive was beaten back by the use of massive firepower, causing horrific devastation and leading to the well-known comment by a US commander that the city of Bien Tre had to be destroyed in order to save it.
US officials claimed that the Tet offensive had been a military disaster for the NLF because the guerillas casualty rate was so much higher. At the end of the Tet offensive, however, the NLF claimed to have liberated an additional 1.5 million villagers from the Saigon regime's control.
Far more significant than its immediate military outcome, however, was the Tet offensive's political impact in the US. It demonstrated to large numbers of Americans that the war was unwinnable on the battlefield.
Sensing the shift in public mood, in March 1968 US President Lyndon Johnson refused a request to send an additional 200,000 US troops and announced the US would halt its bombing of North Vietnam if Hanoi and the NLF would enter into peace talks.
Although Johnson and his Republican successor, Richard Nixon, actually escalated the bombing, the failure and brutality of the US response to the Tet offensive turned more and more US residents against the war.
Beginning in late 1969, repeated mass anti-war protests demanded the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, giving strength to growing anti-war activity within the ranks of the US military.
In an article published in the June 7, 1971, Armed Forces Journal, US Marine Colonel Robert Heinl wrote: "Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers."
The mass anti-war movement, at home and within its army in Vietnam, forced Washington to scale down and eventually end its occupation in early 1973. Two years later, the Saigon puppet regime and its million-strong army collapsed within 55 days of the launching of a new offensive by the Vietnamese resistance fighters.
The question remains whether the recent events at Fallujah will have the same impact as the Tet offensive.
From Green Left Weekly, April 21, 2004.
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