A Vietnam history primer; Tet Offensive

The Wall Street Journal today contains an article today that rebuts the MSM/DNC revised standard version of the Vietnam War:

On January 30, 1968, more than a quarter million North Vietnamese soldiers and 100,000 Viet Cong irregulars launched a massive attack on South Vietnam. But the public didn't hear about who had won this most decisive battle of the Vietnam War, the so-called Tet offensive, until much too late.

Media misreporting of Tet passed into our collective memory. That picture gave antiwar activism an unwarranted credibility that persists today in Congress, and in the media reaction to the war in Iraq. The Tet experience provides a narrative model for those who wish to see all U.S. military successes -- such as the Petraeus surge -- minimized and glossed over.

Arthur Herman provides some basic numbers that any student of that era's history should know:

The Tet offensive came at the end of a long string of communist setbacks. By 1967 their insurgent army in the South, the Viet Cong, had proved increasingly ineffective, both as a military and political force. Once American combat troops began arriving in the summer of 1965, the communists were mauled in one battle after another, despite massive Hanoi support for the southern insurgency with soldiers and arms. By 1967 the VC had lost control over areas like the Mekong Delta -- ironically, the very place where reporters David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan had first diagnosed a Vietnam "quagmire" that never existed.

The Tet offensive was Hanoi's desperate throw of the dice to seize South Vietnam's northern provinces using conventional armies, while simultaneously triggering a popular uprising in support of the Viet Cong. Both failed. Americans and South Vietnamese soon put down the attacks, which began under cover of a cease-fire to celebrate the Tet lunar new year. By March 2, when U.S. Marines crushed the last North Vietnamese pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue, the VC had lost 80,000-100,000 killed or wounded without capturing a single province.

Tet was a particularly crushing defeat for the VC. It had not only failed to trigger any uprising but also cost them "our best people," as former Viet Cong doctor Duong Quyunh Hoa later admitted to reporter Stanley Karnow. Yet the very fact of the U.S. military victory -- "The North Vietnamese," noted National Security official William Bundy at the time, "fought to the last Viet Cong" -- was spun otherwise by most of the U.S. press.

Vietnam is spoken or written of in vague terms. References to "quagmire," "another Vietnam," "the limits to American Imperialism," etc. have nearly paralyzed American foreign policy for more than three decades. American policy in Vietnam was successful until American leftist propagandists and politicians squandered our hard won victory:

The failure of the North's next massive invasion over Easter 1972, which cost the North Vietnamese army another 100,000 men and half their tanks and artillery, finally forced it to sign the peace accords in Paris and formally to recognize the Republic of South Vietnam. By August 1972 there were no U.S. combat forces left in Vietnam, precisely because, contrary to the overwhelming mass of press reports, American policy there had been a success.

To Congress and the public, however, the war had been nothing but a debacle. And by withdrawing American troops, President Nixon gave up any U.S. political or military leverage on Vietnam's future. With U.S. military might out of the equation, the North quickly cheated on the Paris accords. When its re-equipped army launched a massive attack in 1975, Congress refused to redeem Nixon's pledges of military support for the South. Instead, President Gerald Ford bowed to what the media had convinced the American public was inevitable: the fall of Vietnam.

The collapse of South Vietnam's neighbor, Cambodia, soon followed. Southeast Asia entered the era of the "killing fields," exterminating in a brief few years an estimated two million people -- 30% of the Cambodian population. American military policy has borne the scars of Vietnam ever since.

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow.

To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America's allies in the years ahead?

Marl Steyn - August 25, 2007

Al Zarqawi; Ho Chi Minh; the War on Al Qaeda

The MSM/DNC's favorite subject is Vietnam. The MSM/DNC will forever compare every war to Vietnam (unless that war is, itself, contrary to U.S. interests - like Bill Clinton's alliance with Kosovar muslims against the Serbian people). MSM/DNC has made it a fundamental strategy in its War on the War on Terror to say "Vietnam" at every opportunity.

But another difference has now emerged between Vietnam and the War on Terror. With all of its apparent expertise in Vietnam, the least the MSM/DNC could do is mention the fact that U.S. troops never killed Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam war (Ho died of natural causes in 1969). But last week, as the MSM/DNC was forced to admit, U.S. forces killed Al Zarqawi.

Killing Al Zarqawi is not as good as killing Osama bin Laden. [Then again, the U.S. didn't kill Mao or Brezhnev during the Vietnam war]. But now Zarqawi cannot be praised by MSM/DNC historians as the man who "outfought" the United States - or the man who would have brought Jefferson style democracy to Iraq if only we had let him - or any other Ho-style sycophancy.

Zarqawi's death points out another crucial fact about this war. In Iraq, we are fighting Al Qaeda. We are no longer fighting Saddam Hussein. Hussein is in prison. Al Qaeda threatens to take over Iraq, just like they recently took over Somalia. Al Qaeda is the organization that knocked down the twin towers (and numerous other buildings in the immediate vicinity). The longer we stay in Iraq, the more Al Qaeda we kill. Those who urge immediate pullout from Iraq are demanding a retreat in the face of Al Qaeda.

Their surrender mentality is masked only by the passage of nearly five years since 9-11. Had Murtha, Kerry, etc. demanded retreat on September 12, 2001, they would have been marginalized immediately. Instead, they waited a few years and hid behind the fog created by years of MSM/DNC nitpicking and misdirection.

In order to clear the fog, just remember 2 things.

(1) Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center complex.

(2) We fight Al Qaeda now in Iraq.

Leslie Stahl is stuck on stupid

In February, I wrote of the MSM/DNC's never ending fascination with Watergate and the left's need to rehash that episode at every opportunity:

The MSM/DNC needs Watergate. If Watergate did not occur, MSM/DNC would have had to invent it. [Come to think of it, isn't that how the Bush national guard story got started?] Recent elections (both at home and abroad) have left very little for MSM/DNC to celebrate. So it rehashes past victories and revels in the glory days. Watergate and Vietnam. These two events will be served, re-served, salivated over, chewed on, swallowed and digested over and over again in the pages of the MSM/DNC newspapers ad nauseam until the rest of us throw up our hands and let the MSM/DNC run the government again.

A few months after this post, the "Deep Throat" story broke and the Watergate feeding frenzy was on again.

It appears that Leslie Stahl is one of many MSM/DNC mouthpieces that just can't let it go. She appeared on Comedy Central to announce that the Plame/Flame affair could turn in to another Watergate.

In the past 30 plus years during Republican administrations, there hasn't been a single event that the MSM/DNC didn't predict would be the next Watergate. [But Bill Clinton's sale of nuclear technology to China was nothing like Watergate.]

Read the transcript at NewsBusters. Stahl seems unable to react to or play along with the host's jokes or wit. Stahl's stiffness is almost as funny as Stephen Colbert's quips.


This is not Leslie Stahl, but it is a better picture than the other ones I found on Google.

Quote of the day - Ann Coulter

By 1973, John Kerry had already accused American soldiers of committing war crimes in Vietnam, thrown someone else's medals to the ground in an anti-war demonstration, and married his first heiress.

Ann Coulter

Rathergate Anniversary - 50 days and counting - General William Westmoreland

Click here for previous editions of the Rathergate countdown and discussions of media revolution that Rathergate symbolizes and accelerated.

















General William Westmoreland died two days ago. His death reminds me of a chapter in media history that demonstrated to me in 1982 the oppressiveness of the media. Little did I know that we were even then on the verge of an historic revolution.

Westmoreland fought a well known battle against CBS when a 1982 CBS documentary edited Westmoreland's words in a misleading way. CBS implied that Westmoreland had manipulated casualty lists during the Vietnam war and withheld bad news from President Johnson. Westmoreland sued CBS but eventually settled the lawsuit.

Had the blogosphere existed in 1982, CBS would have suffered a much larger blow to its credibility as a result of the exposure of the CBS clever editing techniques. As I recall, TV Guide presented a lengthy refutation of the CBS documentary, but one article cannot compare to the swarming power of multiple blogs demanding answers and exposing falsehoods 24/7.

The difference between 1982 and 9-8-04 is enormous.

Debbie Schlussel also commented on this yesterday.